Bonjour Christian, On 10-Jul-19 15:05, Christian Huitema wrote: > > >> 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 did not only mean potential writers of RFCs. There's a very wide community of technical RFC readers, any of whom might want to activate the "C" (for Comments) or whose work might be affected by a particular RFC. 3GPP and ITU-T documents are littered with RFC citations. If you look at the citations in CCR, SIGCOMM, or IEEE papers, you'll see our overlap with academia. There are technical journalists, who are very well able to find and (mis)understand RFCs. There are also non-technical readers, even politicians. In any case the IETF and IRTF have fuzzy notions of membership, so there is no real boundary outside which the only potential authors are writing Independent Submissions. So no, I don't think it's a myth, it's just hard to define. Regards Brian > 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 >
