[Rfcplusplus] Conversation as metaphor

[Ted Hardie <[e-mail]>]

In a different thread, Eric made a statement about the RFC Series being in
conversation with other publications:

The RFC series (and also I-Ds) have an important role to play here, but it
> also exists in conversation with a lot of other publication venues, and I
> think that's healthy.
>

While I agree with him, I think the metaphor of "conversation" is even more
useful in describing both the current series and the question before us.
>From my personal perspective, the primary reason we use "RFC" as a series
identifier is to identify a specific set of technical documents as part of
a common "conversation".  The adoption of the term and series by the IETF
was a signal about the conversation their documents were to be part of;
choosing a different document  series (like ANSI, ISO, or minting a new
one) would have sent a signal about a different technical community with
whom the IETF was in dialog.

When the idea of different streams and stream managers gelled, we kept the
same series identifier for all of them.  I think, personally, we did that
because we wanted to be clear that all of the documents continued to be
part of a larger conversation about the development of Internet
technologies.

One way to understand the problem motivating this BoF is also through the
metaphor of conversation: many outside the community simply don't recognize
that there are multiple voices inside that conversation.  They see all of
the documents as utterances by a single, somewhat nebulous group.  That can
cause problems.  Among those named earlier were the academic community's
failure to value the output of the IRTF; vendors or customers not
distinguishing consensus output from proprietary alternatives; and even a
few efforts to get rejected ideas to appear to have been accepted ones.

The question before us could be cast as:  is it more important now to
highlight the different voices that the streams and statuses currently
convey, so that others understand them as disctinct?

As Eric points out, there are other ways to maintain a conversation among
different groups than to make their output part of a single series.  There
are also other ways we could try to make sure that we highlight that
distinction more fully (using STD numbers for all IETF standards documents,
for example, from proposed standard onward).  But I think this is the core
of the tension, shorn of discussion of brand or history:  how to we get to
the right balance of maintaining the conversation while improving the
understanding that these are individual voices within it?

My thoughts as individual,

regards,

Ted