--On Monday, October 1, 2018 13:20 -0400 Michael Richardson
<mcr+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>.,..
> My point is that we need to better acknowledge contributions
> in the form of review into our documents. I pointed to the
> datatracker that keeps track of formal reviews, and that is
> definitely good data, but I feel that it needs to make into
> the document in a way that provides clear credit.
>
> This is part of the diversity consideration because not
> everyone can contribute by writing documents, but they often
> can contribute through review. Review is as important, maybe
> even more important, than the writing itself.
>
> We do not, for instance, even have a clear tradition to
> acknowledge the WG chairs in the documents, which makes it
> hard for employers to agree to allocate valuable time that
> could (as Nico writes) be spend writing code, to instead
> manage process.
>
> I'd like the acknowledgements to be structured (i.e. present
> in the XML as structured entries).
Michael,
Agreed, but note that, if you want such acknowledgments to be
useful for some of the purposes you and others have argued they
would help with, you may need to figure out how to differentiate
between a review that addresses the document substantively and
makes a contribution to its quality and one that has substantive
content equivalent to "I'm the designated Fubar team reviewer. I
know nothing about the subject matter of this document, but I
found a comma out of place in the middle of the second paragraph
of Section 6.6.6".
Speaking as someone who has always tried to acknowledge the
authors of review comments that are actually helpful and who
generally tries to resolve questions in which there is doubt
about whether an acknowledgment is needed by including it, I'm
not completely sure what the issue is. As I read our IPR rules,
that behavior is just about required. Or, put differently,
whether we need actual additional rules and procedures or just
more attention to general guidance.
Would you consider it useful if, following the example of many
journals, we simply posted a list of active "team" reviewers (or
all reviewers during IETF Last Call at regular (annual?)
intervals? That at least would not require acknowledging
content-free reviews in the documents themselves, thereby
diminishing the perceived value of acknowledgements for actual
contributions.
best,
john
