Re: Acknowledgements section in a RFC (Was: Last Call: 'Matching of Language Tags' to BCP (draft-ietf-ltru-matching)

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The basic problem is that there is no way to acknowledge all the folks who helped, for the most general definition of "contributor". One would have to keep track of every person who made a comment on the mailing list (whether the particular change ended up used or not) and everyone who spoke at the meeting. That is why it is common (but not mandatory) to acknowledge the working group that worked on the draft. This relates to the acknowledgement section more than the contributors section.

Acknowledging folks who helped is a good idea. Particularly for a volunteer organization. But we can not and do not have to be fanatic about trying to acknowledge everyone.

On a historical note, the acknowledgements section was intended for folks who wrote pieces, or folks who suggested useful ideas, or provided significant useful corrections, etc. The contributors section was introduced in conjunction with the effort to reduce the set of authors to those who wrote the primary text. So Contributors is usually used for those who wrote sections of text, but not enough to be authors. (The debate about whether we should ahve that distinction is a different discussion, please.) So we actually should be trying to be careful and thurough about the "contributors" section, since those are folks who wrote noticeably more than a single paragraph, and we ought to be able to tell who they are. Even then, mistakes will be made, and as far as I can tell it is not fatal.

Yours,
Joel M. Halpern

At 07:47 AM 6/7/2006, Spencer Dawkins wrote:
Perhaps I lead a sheltered life, but on two of these points...

> - Appendix A - some names seem to be missing. I could quote a small
> score of them?

I do not know if there are written rules about the "Acknowledgements"
or "Credits" section in a RFC. It seems quite variable between the
RFCs. I am mentioned in draft-ietf-ltru-matching-14 for what I regard
as a very small contribution and not in RFC 4408 where I feel that my
contribution is more substantive.

Dear Stephane,
This may seem trivial, but IMHO quoting every contributor is important for several key reasons.

- the IETF is made of paid and free volunteers. The reward of the free participants is their exposure. If we want top quality participants we must acknowledge their contributions.

This is a real concern (I am a working group draft editor for a draft where probably 30 percent of the e-mail I've received on the draft has been about acknowledgements). I thought it was a more serious concern for academics and consultants, but am now seeing the same concerns from corporate standards types and development engineers in other working groups. I have expressed this as a concern in private e-mail, but don't know what the answer is.

- the IPR is to all the co-authors. Every person having contributed a word, a concept, a change, positively or negatively is a co-author. This also has some importance to show the document is not the work of an affinity group (as discussed in RFC 3774) but of a true WG.

In my limited SDO experience, beyond IETF I am most familar with IEEE 802.1 practice, which is to list "participants" (at least, this is what appears in the most recent IEEE 802.1 standard appearing on "Getieee802" at http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/download/802.1AB-2005.pdf), where the list is "membership at the time of approval", and "balloted at various times".

Since we have no clue who the "membership" of an IETF working group is, I don't know how to do the equivalent thing here.

Spencer


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