The IETF prides itself on its open process and transparent communication, with one of our core principles being our commitment to making all materials related to our standards process and other activities publicly available. For a document undergoing publication within the IETF Stream, most of its history can be traced by exploring the mail archive - from the first submission, to Last Call comments, to IESG evaluation. However, once the document enters the RFC Editor queue, the communication between authors and RFC Production Center (RPC) is only visible to a specific set of people: RFC editors, authors, the responsible ADs and WG chairs (when applicable). In order to increase transparency during the final stages of document editing, the IESG, IAB, ISE, IRSG, Temporary RFC Series Project Manager, RPC, and Tools team are considering allowing anyone to search and read AUTH48 conversations about specific documents (or clusters of documents). It is not a goal to actively involve more people in the conversation between authors and RFC editors. Our proposal: to set up a public mailing list of AUTH48 conversations, for archival purposes only, i.e., read-only. The RFC editors, when initiating the conversation with the authors will CC this mailing list. All further responses usually maintain the CC addresses, and as a consequence will be archived in the mailing list archive. All AUTH48 discussions of all documents will be archived on the same mailing list. Searches and filtering will be available based on the mails’ content and metadata, including draft name, RFC-to-be number, cluster number, sender, and date. Opt out: the authors and RFC editors are able to opt out from archival, by removing the mailing list from the CC. Although we don’t envision that this will be necessary often, there may be cases where sensitive information needs to be shared. The initial AUTH48 mail from the RFC Editor will also include text about public archival, to make sure authors are aware. With this announcement, the IESG wants to inform the community and read feedback before we set anything up. Please send any comment to iesg@xxxxxxxx or reply to this thread by 24 March 2022. Francesca Palombini for the IESG
