--On Friday, October 18, 2013 10:13 -0400 Andrew Sullivan <ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > No hat. > > On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 06:52:11PM -0400, John C Klensin wrote: >> I wonder if we should be publishing, at regular intervals, >> RFCs with explicit acknowledgements and maybe contact >> information for Areas and ADs, WG Chairs, and, if >> appropriate, other IETF functionaries, probably including >> document reviewers and Nomcom members. Hi. I'm not going to spend much energy defending that idea. If it seems useful, fine. If not, drop it. So one comment-message and then I'll stop > I'm not keen on adding this cruft to the RFC series. I note > that the tools pages are now archived, so if you go to > http://tools.ietf.org/wg/dnsext you will find that it's > concluded and that Olafur and I were chair at the end. What > you _won't_ find is the history of other chairs. Maybe that's > an issue? > On the other hand, isn't this what resumes are for? It depends on one's purpose. If you put in your resume that you chaired that WG, and some wants to verify that, the tools pages are fine. If Olaf does, he is probably in trouble and that is one of several reasons why one might want a back trace (but doesn't justify an RFC). On the other hand, if someone wanted to know which WGs you had chaired since you started participating in the IETF, that had better be in your resume because trying to find it from the tools pages (even with Chair history as well as Charter history) would be a little tedious. (I just noticed that information isn't in my CV; maybe it should be.) If I'm working for a company than is credit-happy, or if I have a boss who wants to see my name in print to justify my job, salary, or next meeting costs, I'm perhaps likely to prefer something a little more solid and archival. As far as academic, etc., credit is concerned, part of what stimulated the idea was the practice in several journals of publishing an annual list of reviewers, partially to give credit while keeping the reviewer-article binding confidential. The analogy isn't terribly good, but... Could we do the same job by making sure that WG Chairs, Shepherds, ADs, and other folks who move the work along are acknowledged? I don't know, although I agree that being somewhat better about those sorts of acknowledgements would be a good idea (and I just modified the template I use to remind me to do that). Barry might go ask whomever raised the issue what would or would not help. As to simply listing everyone as a co-author or otherwise on the front page, first of all, the reason for the "tradition" was a strong conviction that the listed person should be a real author, document consolidator/ editor, and/or what we sometimes call the "holder of the pen" _and_ the primary contact person(s). For a given document, the number of those people is rarely more than one or two. In that context, "five" was a concession and everyone else goes either into Acknowledgments or a "Contributors" section (another concession). Do we want to go to listing everyone in sight, including people's managers, their managers, and perhaps their kindergarten teachers, as authors? I hope not, but that is just my personal bias. If nothing else, we are doing (largely) standards and protocol specifications here, not scientific papers and the accountability issues are entirely different. Or maybe there is an entirely different problem. I was vastly amused by a recent posting in a different thread that suggested that much of the IETF's leadership started their professional careers around 1987. I've got a couple of decades on that as does Steve Crocker who was the first person who posted a note endorsing the RFC idea. If the IETF conclusion is that the idea appeals only to elderly types who didn't grow up with the web and other modern media, then drop it. On the other hand, Steve and I have a tad more experience dealing with these sorts of issue at a senior management and promotion and budget justification level than the IETF average, so maybe it is not _just_ a geriatric reaction. john