To follow up on this,
On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 2:32 AM Adrian Farrel <adrian@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
You asked... 😊
> 1. The emerging view of the community is that an RPC employee *contributing* to a
> draft is sufficiently distant from the RPC process to avoid any conflict of interest.
> It appears to me that *authoring* a draft however does introduce a conflict of
> interest (COI) as part of the RPC role is to enforce specific standards that authors
> must comply with, which is a standard COI that is controlled by separation of powers.
> There is an existing situation where RPC staff author RFCs on behalf of the RPC but
> that is different from a personal role.
There is no clear line between "authoring" and "contributing". This is, I think, a misunderstanding of how the IETF works.
An "author" may simply be an editor who compiles the consensus-view text.
A "contributor" may supply most of the text in a draft.
I agree with Adrian, here, with what I hope is the friendly amendment that MOST of us are confused about that (it's not just you, Jay!)
We have had our shoelaces tied together between "names on the front of an RFC" versus "editors" versus "authors" versus "additional authors" versus "contributors" versus "people who provided helpful reviews and comments which contributed text" versus other variants that I can't think of, right now, and it's been that way since we started getting so many names on the front of an RFC that everything else flowed off the first page and that broke tools (so, at least a couple of decades).
But ""author" versus "contributor" definitely isn't a useful distinction.
Best,
Spencer
