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

[Adrian Farrel <[e-mail]>]

Thanks Nevil,

 

I find that a useful set of points.

 

Can I note that the whole style guide was a joint product of the RSE and RPC. This is important because (sweeping generalisation) the copy-editor function applies a style guide while the editor produces the style guide.

 

(If anyone here is unaware of the value and importance of a style guide, I’d be happy to provide some pointers off-list.)

 

Best,

Adrian

 

From: Rfced-future <[e-mail]> On Behalf Of Nevil Brownlee
Sent: 10 July 2020 05:56
To: [e-mail]
Cc: Nevil Brownlee <[e-mail]>
Subject: [Rfced-future] What would an "RFC Series Consultant" actually do?

 

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