On 2019-10-05 00:07, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > 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. I agree, and it's an important point. Henrik > 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 > _______________________________________________ > rfc-interest mailing list > rfc-interest@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx > https://www.rfc-editor.org/mailman/listinfo/rfc-interest >
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