On 10/22/21 9:37 AM, Salz, Rich wrote:
Is the relevance of a typical IETF RFC going up or down?
How do you tell? Can you measure it, other than have opinions?
I don't know how to measure it. (Also, I think there's a general
problem in society these days which is that we pay more attention to
things that are easily measured, than to things that aren't, even when
the things that are easily measured are less important.)
I do however suggest (for example) that work that has significant
potential benefit for a broad portion of the Internet user community, is
more deserving of IETF attention than work that has less significant
benefit, or which benefits a narrow portion of the user community.
I also wonder (again for example) to what extent it's worth a multi-year
effort to make detailed minor revisions to old specifications of old
protocols is worth IETF's attention, or whether there's a point of
diminishing returns, after which trying to rewrite old documents creates
more ambiguities or interoperability problems than it solves. I wonder
if we could find a better way to update old documents than to publish
new RFCs to replace them, with the dual goals of taking less work to get
to completion and also encouraging changes to mature specifications only
where and when they are necessary.
I don't like quotas. But what would happen if we set a goal of
producing fewer technical RFCs every year, of more average relevance
than the average technical RFC of the previous year?
Keith
