The IAOC is pleased to announce that it has signed a Letter of Intent with the University of Southern California to negotiate an agreement for the Information Sciences Institute to undertake a new term as the RFC Editor. Assuming an agreement on contract terms and conditions can be reached, the contract would begin on January 1, 2007 and run for two years, with an option for an additional year. As you may recall the IAOC received three bids in response to the RFP let in July. The IAOC thoroughly reviewed the competing proposals, including teleconference meetings with all the respondants, evaluation of responses to skills demonstrations, consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of the respondents in terms of the many tasks laid out in the RFP's SoW, and pricing. The IAOC started this process seeking to ensure consistent and professional support for the continuation of the RFC series publication, to support the IAB's goal for improved community involvement in the RFC series direction as described in draft-iab-rfc-editor, and a more efficient, less costly operation. The IAOC has determined the best path forward to achieve a balance of those goals is to proceed with ISI for RFC Editor services, except for copyediting services, which will be managed by IASA in a separate contract(s). In 2006 the RFC Editor turned the corner on performance - eliminating the backlog, improving processing times and delivering record setting production of RFCs. Based on ISI's thoughtful and constructive response to the competitive RFP, we are anticipating an important change in the trend of costs, as well, with an improvement in 2007 over 2006, and a larger reduction of costs in 2008. After briefing the IAB, as part of the IAB's RFC Editor oversight role, and obtaining their support for this direction, the IAOC has engaged in further negotiations with ISI and relevant copy-editing contractors. It is anticipated that contracts will be executed in early December. It is the IAOC's understanding and expectation that the IAB will complete draft-iab-rfc-editor and commit to the model of engagement with the RFC Editor and Internet community outlined in it. In particular, the IAOC would like the IAB, RFC Editor and the community to work together to clearly document the component pieces of the RFC series support (e.g., possibly separating the RFC Editor and RFC Publisher functions) so that the IAOC can more effectively compete appropriate task groups independently at the end of this contract term. Ray Pelletier IAD _______________________________________________ IETF-Announce@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-announce
