On 10/4/2019 2:31 AM, Stephen Farrell
wrote:
On 04/10/2019 08:51, Christian Huitema wrote:
I have heard Brian Carpenter's argument that if there is not an
authorship community, there is a readership community. That leaves me
skeptical. Clearly, authors and publishers should care about their
readership, and I wish we had better ways to assess the impact of our
publications. But passive readership does not create a community, no
more than me reading ITU publications makes me part of the ITU
community. What creates a community is engagement, contributions and
sharing.
I guess I disagree with you there Christian - ISTM that
at the very least, people who read RFCs and write related
code that is part of many network stacks, but who do not
engage with the IETF or RFC editor at all, do deserve more
consideration than you imply. I can see arguments for a
bigger set of people deserving consideration but omitting
the above example set seems just broken to me.
Sure, but if they don't somehow communicate, how do you know they
are there?
And if they do communicate, the question is "with whom"? Where do
they send the message saying that they are trying to implement
protocol FOO but they don't get what section 3.1.5 of RFC XXXX
really means? Slashdot? Stack overflow? Some Reddit group?
Actually, it would be very nice if the IETF had a documented
feedback channel for such exchanges. That would be a nice way to
grow the community.
-- Christian Huitema
