Re: [Rfced-future] Model proposal

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

Martin,

Thanks for writing down your ideas. You won't be surprised that I disagree...

The basic problem is that this focuses rather narrowly on the RFC production process and short-changes the strategy issue. I do agree that we need to make it clear that this is a process that is contracted out by the LLC and that therefore oversight of contract performance belongs 100% to the LLC, which automatically eliminates much of what the RSOC has been doing. To the extent that the RSE was previously involved in contract monitoring, I think that should be eliminated too. I think there's also agreement that IT work such as the xml2rfcv3 migration should be overseen as an engineering project, not by the RSE** role.

(** I'm not sure that RSE is still the right job title, but I'll use it for convenience.)

However:

> Setting the policies that set targets for REP performance and more detailed requirements for operation of their functions has historically been delegated to the RSOC.

No. Historically it was delegated to the RSE. Before the RSOC existed, it was very clear this was a direct and complete delegation from the IAB, with the IAB's role limited, as I have quoted many times, to "approve the appointment of an organization to act as RFC Editor and the general policy followed by the RFC Editor." Since the RSOC was created, that BCP hasn't been updated, so the authority that the IAB delegated to the RSOC really was the same. Quoting RFC6635:

"The RSOC will act with authority delegated from the IAB: in general,
 it will be the RSOC that will approve consensus policy and vision
 documents as developed by the RSE in collaboration with the
 community."

So your proposal:

"Concretely, this proposes forming a RFC Series Evolution program of the IAB that uses the auspices of an IAB program, one that closely follows the model proposed in [RSEME]."

is a radical change that abolishes the Series Editor role and leaves this set of worries on the IAB's plate, but without having a senior professional with relevant knowledge and experience in charge of the community consultation. (We all agree on the need for organised community consultation, I think.)

The other aspect that's bothersome to me is that the net effect is *more* work for the IAB, rather than less. Surely as a community we should make it easier for the IAB to do its main job, which is the A bit of its name. So I think we should go in exactly the opposite direction: remove the RFC Editor entirely from the IAB's job description, create/enhance the community consultation mechanism, and again bring in someone with an appropriate skill set to lead that process and formulate strategy etc.

That would actually be substantially less than what the previous RSE was asked to do, because of what I think is common ground: that oversight of the RPC contracts and of any paid tools development properly belongs to the LLC. So it is mainly a strategy/policy role that possibly needs a new name.

Regards
   Brian Carpenter

On 07-Jul-20 13:11, Martin Thomson wrote:
> The following is an attempt to show a more fully-formed working based on some of the arguments I have presented recently.
> 
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-thomson-rfced-model-00
> 
> I know that several people asked "so you said X, but what does that look like?"  Hopefully, this has enough detail to make the concepts clear.
> 
> This is quite rough, I've almost certainly overlooked a few things, and much of this is very much tentative.  These aren't firmly held views either; I'm happy to discuss further.
>