[Rfced-future] What would an "RFC Series Consultant" actually do?

[Nevil Brownlee <[e-mail]>]

Hi all:
Watching the list for the last few days, we seem to be proposing an "RFC
Series *Publishing) Consultant" to "handle Strategy Development for the
series."

When thinking about what the consultant (whatever we call her) actually
does, let's start with the things Heather actually did ...

1. The RPC often runs into tricky edge cases that don't quite fit the Style
Guide.  Heather used to have weekly meetings with the RPC editors (which I
sat in on for 8 years or so); as a group we resolved those issues quickly,
and the RPC saved them for updates to the Style Guide.  I suspect that John
Levine is doing that rather well now.

2. Changes to the series.  That's probably what the list sees as "Strategy"
questions, so the Series Editorial Board (whatever form it eventually
takes) is probably the right place for discussions about that.  Such
changes could, for example, have included how best to provide long-term
digital preservation for the series - Heather spent rather a lot of time on
that.

3. Implementing changes.  Heather actually put a lot of time into the
svg2rfc v3 implementation, a fair bit of that work was contracted out and
overseen by the Tools Team; i.e. we have a precedent for contracting such
work.  However, the ongoing part of the v3 changes is to collect feedback
from authors, the RPC, etc, and feed that back into updates of software and
documentation.    That's a long-term task, but presumably one that could
also be contracted out.

Overall the Series Consultant role does indeed comprise quite a range of
tasks, and I believe the long-term development ones really do need someone
with Publishing and Information Management expertise.

As for finding a suitable person for the "Consultant" role, the 2018 RSOC
formed a Search Committee, which was able to find about eight applicants
with publishing or library experience. We brought three of them to IETF 79
in Beijing so that they could find out about the IETF and how it worked,
and we could interview them.  From those three we chose Heather.  In short,
although it's not easy to find people with the right background, we managed
to do it in 2010.

Cheers, Nevil
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Nevil Brownlee, Taupo, NZ