Re: [Rfcplusplus] A note on tonight's plenary

[Heather Flanagan <[e-mail]>]

> On Jul 18, 2018, at 14:16, Ted Hardie <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 1:59 PM, Andrew G. Malis <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> Ted,
>> 
>> Thank you for your clear summarization of the IAB’s thoughts.
>> 
>> To make the next step clear, would that be for the RSE to analyze the issues discussed during the BOF and to gather data on market perception, and then report the results to the community?
>> 
> 
> I've copied Heather explicitly here, in case she has not yet seen your question.
> 
> I think there is likely to be more than one next step, but I believe among them will be Heather gathering data on market perception of the RFC series. Note, however, that she only committed at the BoF to moving it up the priority stack; she and the RSOC are very busy with the final stretch on the format work at the moment.  
> 
> She may be able to comment further,

Indeed she can! I’m not quite sure how much detail you all are looking for, but I’ll give you a quick outline. I’ll also note that I’m always open to feedback if people think I might be missing an area to explore. 

My most immediate next steps involve talking to a wide variety of people, both within the SDO universe and some a bit farther afield. For example, I have set up time to talk to a few people at the Internet Society about how they generally go about doing market research; I’d like to know what resources within this area of expertise are immediately available.  From there, I will be reaching out to several of my contacts within the scholarly and technical publishing community to get some ideas of what they do when they encounter a journal that might need to be broken out into separate entities. (Note: I don’t know that we’re ever going to want to do that, but the information on the process from folks who do this kind of thing relatively frequently will be useful.) I also plan on collecting (perhaps commiserating) with contacts at the W3C, IEEE, NISO, and possibly ISO to get a better understanding of what they do, what they wish they had done, and what (if any) changes we make would do to their workflow and reference material. 

The IETF community can also expect me to be reaching out to see if I can find contacts within some of the big companies that reference our documents to see what they know (or think they know) about RFCs and how they would expect to find out about changes to the series. But honestly, I don’t expect to get to this step for a while. I need to have clearly formed questions first.

What happens after all that information gathering largely depends on what I find out. As always, I’ll try to keep people updated via my RSE reports, discussions on rfc-interest, hallway conversations, bar conversations, RFC Editor desk conversations, airplane boarding queue conversations, and any other ways I can think of that might be useful. 

I hope that helps clarify what I’m going to do next in with this topic. As Ted pointed out, my priority is to get the format project in production. I’d also like to spend some quality time determining how to improve the quality of metadata for RFCs, explore the possibility of a sandbox space to experiment with things like web annotations, work with the RPC to see how their tools and workflow can be improved, and several other things. 

Thanks for all the feedback this week! As always, contact me if you have any questions, ideas, concerns, or other feedback you’d like to offer.

-Heather Flanagan, RSE