Re: [Rfced-future] Scope and IETF 108 proposals

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

I wanted to answer Martin's message below and Mark's immediately previous one together:

Yes, the technical and copy editing functions are performed for us by the RFC production service. Nobody has suggested that the "RSE" does any of that, beyond setting strategy and editorial guidelines. (Technical and copy editors work within whatever guidelines the publisher gives them.)

Yes, as far as technical content goes, the streams are pretty good at what they do, and we've already apparently reached a rough consensus that the "RSE" has no veto on technical content.

But that's not all that the RFC series is. Like it or not, it's been around for 50 years and is not just a collection of technical specs. It also contains, and I hope will continue to contain, opinion pieces, operational observations and analyses, research results, dissents, roadmaps and more. It has, you might say, a life of its own.

The analogy with W3C or WHATWG publications seems to me to be just as false as those with newspapers or academic journals. It might apply to the IETF stream, but not to RFCs as a whole.

I think that the series needs a guide who is indeed independent of all the streams. Whether that guide is an individual, an individual supported by a Board, or a stand-alone NewOrg of some kind is secondary. Whether the guide is known as the RFC Series Editor or something else is secondary. But if we don't have such a guide, we'll end up with Brownian motion.

Regards
   Brian Carpenter

On 03-Jul-20 13:59, Martin Thomson wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 2, 2020, at 23:12, Eliot Lear wrote:
>> The E in IETF is Engineering and not Editing. We attract engineers to 
>> standardize specifications. In what way do you believe we attract 
>> people from the world of editing/publishing to incur the expense of 
>> participating?*
> 
> Given what I've been doing for the past N years, I'm not sure that I find the stark binary characterization here very flattering.
> 
> But I think that the "editor" label is another thing that is doing us a disservice in this discussion.  There are many meanings we are talking about:
> 
> * My contributions as "editor" of a specification are exactly the sorts of contributions that we expect people in the community to provide.
> 
> * The contributions of the RPC in finishing a document are exactly the sorts of contributions that we should expect to pay for.  That includes the copy-editing pieces and all the publication pieces.
> 
> * The point on which I think we have disagreement is regarding "editorial control" akin to the roles taken on by lead editors in journals or news publications.  That is, choices regarding content: what content to fund, what content to publish, and what content to promote.
> 
> Regarding this last one, I believe that Ekr's argument is that this function is largely done for us by the streams and not any RSE.  That being the case, I thoroughly agree.  Assuming [1] is an accurate reflection of the Nevil and Brian's views, then I think that this view has fairly wide support, aside from perhaps Mike, who has expressed support for an entity with greater control over content.
> 
> [1] Section 5 of Nevil's proposal here: https://www.ietf.org/id/draft-brownlee-rfc-series-and-rse-changes-01.html#name-independence-of-the-rse
>