I don't think it makes any difference in academia, but I see no problem with a one sentence addition in the acknowledgements section along the lines of "This document is a product of the FOO working group, chaired by Alice and Bob, within the BAR area, with Carol as the responsible area director.", with a suitable free-form recognition ("Only their periodic public floggings of the authors caused this document to be finished.") added as relevant. The working group is often mentioned already, as far as I can tell.
I personally think this would be a good social custom, just as the recognition of reviewers has become reasonably standard, without being governed by formal rules. Shepherds might ask or suggest, as needed.
In academia, WG chair and AD responsibilities would generally be recognized as "professional service and leadership", similar to chairing academic conferences, advisory committees and other service to professional societies. Most US institutions expect this type of leadership from faculty, and are flexible in what form it takes, but it is probably considered a secondary criterion in most places. It can, however, be used by writers of recommendation letters as evidence of community standing and that tends to have non-trivial weight. ("Alice served on the prestigious IESG that manages Internet standards, and in this role ...") At least in US tenure cases, peer letters tend to play a dominant role, rather than just paper or citation counting. While the industrial research landscape seems to be changing (less academic-like), this used to be the case in places like Bell Labs and IBM Research as well.
[I have served as a CS department chair, so this is based on personal experience.]
Henning
On Oct 19, 2013, at 7:41 AM, Carsten Bormann <cabo@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Oct 19, 2013, at 13:37, "Adrian Farrel" <adrian@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> I am struggling to see why name an AD on the front page.
>
> Yeah, sounds dangerous. Will further increase the threshold for getting an RFC out :-)
>
> Seriously: The discussion was about WG chairs, and there it might make more sense.
>
> (But my original idea was not about changing the RFC process at all, but about adding accessible information to the IETF web site.)
>
> Grüße, Carsten
>
>