On Aug 25, 2013, at 8:39 AM, Abdussalam Baryun <abdussalambaryun@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I agree that charging IETF participants with any money is not a good idea, but charging participants with some effort/work/contribution to do is needed. For example, participants SHOULD do some work in IETF, either review, authoring, attending-meetings, commenting on lists, etc. Otherwise the IETF will not develop. If someone just subscribe to the list with no contribution, that I will not call a participant. When I and others have been using the word "participants", we've been talking about the ones who do actively contribute - by reviewing the drafts and providing their input in email or at the mic or in jabber, or by submitting their own drafts, or providing text, etc. Of course there are plenty of folks who merely monitor, and that's fine too, but yeah it's not useful for improving our drafts. But those aren't the "remote participants" I was talking about. > The reward/motivation from IETF to participants is to acknowledge in writting their efforts, which I think still the IETF management still does not motivate/encourage. For the WG's I've been involved in, the WG drafts often do acknowledge major contributors in the "Acknowledgements" section. But yeah it's not always done, or people are sometimes left out. Having authored a few myself, I find it's actually quite hard to keep track of contributors. And I always feel bad if I forget someone. :( If we really feel that's a problem there are some simple solutions to it - the same problem occurs for open source software and they have simple solutions for it. But I'm not sure it really is a problem worth fixing. My belief is the motivation to participate should be: for the benefit of everyone; and for the benefit of the contributor in using or implementing it, by making the mechanism/protocol work better for them and their needs. Putting names in the RFC doesn't feel to me like a thing we should use for the purpose of motivation, but rather just to acknowledge those who went above-and-beyond and were major contributors. No? > IETF Remote Participants (IETFRP) SHOULD charge the IETF not the other way, because still the IETF ignores some IETFRP efforts (or even hides information that should be provided to the diverse community). I have never seen the IETF "hide information that should be provided to the diverse community". That's a pretty serious charge, and you'll have to provide some examples to back it up, because I don't believe it. The only way to do that would be to prevent postings on our mailing lists. I know we have blocked/removed some mailing list subscribers in the past, but those were very rare occasions and debated quite a bit before-hand in an open manner (see RFC 3683). For some obvious cases we don't need to discuss it before-hand (see RFC 3005). The IETF is not lacking for paranoia regarding such things... so I don't think we're in danger of doing what you fear. -hadriel