John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> 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,
> 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
So an alternate stat may be the number of unique people who upload to the
Datatracker. So that would require, for each RFC published, getting the list
of people who uploaded. That would be a lower bound on number active
authors.
The numbers Jari has would be the upper bound.
--
] Never tell me the odds! | ipv6 mesh networks [
] Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works | network architect [
] mcr@xxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.sandelman.ca/ | ruby on rails [
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
