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

Eric Rescorla <ekr@rtfm.com> Fri, 10 July 2020 12:39 UTC

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From: Eric Rescorla <ekr@rtfm.com>
Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2020 05:39:19 -0700
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To: Nevil Brownlee <nevil.brownlee@gmail.com>
Cc: rfced-future@iab.org
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Subject: Re: [Rfced-future] What would an "RFC Series Consultant" actually do?
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On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 9:56 PM Nevil Brownlee <nevil.brownlee@gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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."
>

Hmm... In my conception I don't actually think to "handle" strategy
development but rather to advise on technical matters, both to a community
strategy development process and to the RPC.

>
> 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.
>

I would imagine that this would be largely unchanged.


> 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.
>

I would expect that whatever community process we have would have a
Consultant as an advisor on long-term retainer and would have them present
for some fraction of the discussions, depending on how much it was found to
be useful. We did this in a smaller way with IASA 2 where Brad was
available and regularly consulted.


> 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.
>

My impression is we have rough consensus to break out the project
management pieces. That would be good to understand.


> 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.
>

I was not part of that recruitment process, but the idea here is precisely
to make the role require a set of qualifications that are easier to hire
for, in part by removing the project management pieces.

-Ekr


> Cheers, Nevil
> -----------------------------------
> Nevil Brownlee, Taupo, NZ
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