I agree that many works of great value can be found in early RFCs. But here's my question to you: if the focus is too much on standards, how do we scale the process so that we can have great works that are NOT standards? Clearly neither the IESG nor the IETF need be involved in that process, so long as the work does not misrepresent itself as a standard or other IETF-type work.
Now, you may say that the RFC Editor should take that job. Okay. Then I presume we need to scale the RFC Editor to this sort of task. Another way of looking at this would be to create some sort of refereed track. That would be fine, but then it seems to me that the day of ASCII has to really come to an end (IMHO). (and with the mention of ASCII, why do I feel as though I've just violated Godwin's Law?)
By the way, I think we should also ask where our role ends and where the role of SIGCOMM and the like pick up (he says trying to pay his dues ;-).
Eliot
*> *> Lets take an example. I have been involved in QoS work, and there have been
*> a number of specifications written on the subject; much of that started *> with white papers, including especially
*> *> 0896 Congestion control in IP/TCP internetworks. J. Nagle.
*> Jan-06-1984. (Format: TXT=26782 bytes) (Status: UNKNOWN)
*> *> 0970 On packet switches with infinite storage. J. Nagle. Dec-01-1985.
*> (Format: TXT=35316 bytes) (Status: UNKNOWN)
*>
Fred,
Please note that these references are to published RFCs, which are available in perpetuity in the official document archive of the Internet community, the RFC series. It is an illustration that publishing significant white papers and discussion papers as RFCs has real value, which is being lost lost in what you correctly characterize as an over-emphasis on "standards". We are letting the marketing types rule.
*> *> To leave white papers and internet drafts, many of which are never *> published as RFCs and a relatively small portion ever become standards, *> out, and to leave the discussion part out is, I think, to leave out much of
*> the real value of the IETF. Yes, both of those predate the IETF as we now *> know it, but had the IETF existed then, they would have been very *> appropriate in it. Today's counterparts include papers like some I *> currently have posted (not intending to self-aggrandize, but they're the *> one's I know most quickly). The posting of questions, problems, and ideas *> is perhaps *the* key part; standards are from my perspective only one of *> the products, and perhaps a byproduct.
Yes. So let's consciously endeavor to ensure that sigificant non-standards documents -- responsible position papers, white papers, new ideas, etc. -- become RFCs. (Making Internet Drafts into an archival series seems like a terrible idea to me, but that is a different topic.)
Bob Braden