On 05-Oct-19 07:21, Christian Huitema wrote: > > 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. Yes, but it isn't just the IETF. It's all the streams, so the dispatcher for generic queries will have to be (at least externally) the RFC Editor, I think. On the underlying point - the fuzziness of the community boundary - I really don't believe in magic, or that the community we should worry about is 7.7 billion people. But we would be deluding ourselves to think that we can count the members of the community; we can't even count the members of the IETF. So we really have to accept, IMHO, that there is an open-ended public service responsibility here, not just a responsibility to a well-defined closed community. And if an obscure network operator in Northern Elbonia has a comment to make on an RFC from 1969 tagged in the index as "(Status: UNKNOWN)", that is automatically part of the community discourse, even though we don't know which stream that RFC belongs to. Brian
