On 7/10/2019 5:47 AM, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > 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. Of course there are a variety of people who read RFC. In fact, it would be great if we could get actual feedback from these readers, or even answer simple questions about the readership of [RFC wxyz]. I understand that getting this kind of feedback is actually very hard, in large part because we value "free access" to our information -- and I certainly don't want to see tracking beacons embedded in RFC. But citations or readerships don't make a community. After all, we have plenty of citations of IEEE standards in the RFC stream, but that does not make us part of the IEEE. If I want to provide feedback on some IEEE 802 standard, I have to join them, or act through someone who did. Similarly, people who want to comment on a particular RFC typically provide feedback to the authors or the working group that created it -- i.e., they participate in the IETF, or interact with people who do. -- Christian Huitema
