Re: [Rfced-future] Model proposal

[Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2020 at 10:51 AM Christian Huitema <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> On 7/7/2020 10:27 AM, Joel M. Halpern wrote:
>
> > I understand that other communities handle authorship differently, and
> > that we may (collectively) decide to handle it differently for the RFC
> > series than we currently do.
> >
> > However, if we few it as a single series (which we currently do, with
> > subdivisions) we have taken the few that I think is appropriate that
> > we want a single approach to general appearence, etc.  As such, having
> > drastically different authorship policies for different sub-sets of
> > RFCs would seem a drastic change.
>
>
> I think Joel has a point here. Yes, the IETF is only one of several
> streams, but the RFC series is in practice one of the "brands" of the
> IETF. Having widely different practices in different streams would
> weaken that brand, and contribute to a lesser impact of IETF standards.
> I would advocate some caution there.
>

Well, I'm not advocating recklessness...

In any case, it seems like the most plausible change would be different
overall author limits, in which case the primary thing that would be needed
out of the RFC Series itself would be to not have large numbers of authors
look silly, and then some streams could choose to have lower author limits.
This isn't an especially hard formatting problem: you don't put line breaks
between the authors names and when there are a lot of duplicate
affiliations you use symbolic markers next to the authors.

-Ekr