--On Friday, April 24, 2015 09:40 +0100 "t.p."
<daedulus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Brian
>
> For me, you are implicitly changing the way in which Working
> Groups operate best, in that once an I-D is adopted by a WG,
> then change control should reside in the Working Group
> [RFC2418] and the I-D should be EDITED accordingly. That is,
> there is always an editor at that point and their name is
> likely to be on the first page, often at the top.
For whatever it is worth, that model is fairly close to the one
that Jon Postel preferred for many years. In essence, there
would normally be one name at the top of the page and that name
would identify the person who held the pen at the time of
publication. There was always flexibility about special
circumstances, but one responsible author/editor was the
assumption.
Things have obviously changed. We have gotten the name or names
on the first page tied up with questions of attribution, IPR
issues, the entirely different conventions of more
academic/scholarly and formal publications and carryover of
assumptions from other communities more broadly, and with
compensation and performance review polices in a number of
companies. I'd like to go back; I don't see how.
>...
> I think that getting the process right is more important for
> the IETF than giving people their citations.
Well, I do too and I hope and assume Brian would agree.
However...
* I think the authorship example you cited (and that I elided to
save space), should it actually be a problem, is a sign of poor
WG management by Chairs and ADs. It raises some other issues,
such as whether a WG (or the IETF generally) should be taking on
work when there is only person who is willing (or perceived as
able) to hold the pen on a document. Or maybe it is a sign that
things are just fine: as Loa points out, WGs are different.
However, if the name(s) on an I-D are an important issue in WG
management, that is almost always a symptom of a problem, not a
basic issue.
* Unless we make format and structural changes to make it a lot
more obvious that they are really different, I think having
different rules about authorship for different streams, or even
between WG and individual submission documents within the IETF
stream, would be a mistake that would come back to haunt us. I
think it is entirely appropriate to have the different streams
make judgments about edge cases and cases of controversies, but
the overall policies and definitions affect the integrity of the
RFC Series and hence must be under the control of the RSE rather
than a property of, e.g., how the IETF manages its workflow.
best,
john