--On Friday, November 8, 2019 02:31 -0500 Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 11/8/19 2:11 AM, Jari Arkko wrote: > >> Pretty healthy numbers I'd say, even, if 600-700 people >> manage to publish RFCs and the meetings draw 900-1100 people. > > To me it sounds unhealthy. If meeting attendance is an > indicator of the number of active participants, it sounds like > about half of the participants are publishing an RFC every > year. With that many authors I have to wonder how many people > have time to participate in discussion of others' > documents. Of course a person can author one document > while discussing others, but it's easy for an author's > attention to others' drafts to diminish while revising his own > draft. Keith, As Jari cautioned, those numbers have to be interpreted with care. For example, the number of documents with many authors has has risen over the years since Jon Postel aggressively pushed back against the practice. We also have issued documents that are revisions of older ones. In general, original author names have been retained even when newer authors have been added on and the actual involvement of the original ones has been minimal. There may also be issues with listed contributors because, at the discretion of a WG or whomever is holding the pen, that category may include someone who contributed a concept or a few critical paragraph, but who was not otherwise significantly involved in the production of the document. Even Jari's comment that you quote is problematic because, while 600-700 people may have their names on RFCs that are published, sometimes it is accurate to say that they published them and sometimes some of them are just names. Even the definition of "author" may differ from one document to the next. We also aren't careful about distinguishing between authors and editors. For example, with a document that is really developed by a WG, the "author" may be mostly a compiler of WG comments and text rather than a contributor of and advocate for original ideas. Either may involve a great deal of time and effort, but the kind and level of involvement is different. I even know of at least a couple of often-cited RFCs in which there are several listed authors but none of them, independent of their intellectual or other contributions, actually provided any significant fraction of the published text. Similarly, comparing author counts to f2f meeting registrations does not quite work and is probably getting worse over time as meeting costs rise and active remote participation increases. We should have at least approximate numbers by now for total registered participants, but probably not reaching back to the point that Jari is comfortable with the authorship numbers. I can imagine ways to estimate numbers and control, in the statistical sense, for some (but not all) of those issues without, e.g., interviewing authors or doing a careful document-by-document evaluation. They all would require a lot of work. Maybe others disagree, but I'd rather see the people who would probably need to do that work spending their time on substantive technical contributions instead. But, without doing that work (at least), inferences about how many people are writing documents and therefore not evaluating those of others seems fairly close to pure speculation. best, john
