> On Jul 9, 2019, at 3:22 PM, Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > But this is an area where we have to be very careful to distinguish > decisions that can or should be made by IETF consensus (because they affect the IETF standards process) and decisions that affect the wider technical community, where the authority to declare consensus is much less well defined.. I'm not suggesting that this is a new problem, of course, still less that there is an easy solution I personally think that the "wider technical community" of potential RFC publishers is a pious myth. I think it already was during the Arpanet project: the wider community included a bunch of non-US research networks, but these researchers rarely published in the RFC series, if at all. For example, how many RFC did Louis Pouzin author? There is indeed some amount of RFC that come through the independent stream. But these documents are typically part of the IETF "sphere": documentation of protocols in order to get a code point in one of the IANA registries, documentation of existing protocols as part of WG proposals or dissenting voices in the IETF process. All that is great and useful but these documents are largely IETF centric, even if they are not produced directly by the IETF. Their authors are very often participating in the IETF process, and arguably part of the IETF community. In contrast, there are tons of important networking ideas and standards that are documented outside the RFC process. The IEEE, USENIX, the W3C, OARC, NANOG or RIPE all publish interesting documents, but they don't appear much interested in using the services of the RFC editor. I think we should not try defer to a mythical community. Mythical entities create poor accountability. Power hiding behind a mythical entity is power without balance, and that's not a good way to construct the future. -- Christian Huitema
