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Re: STRAW PROPOSAL RFC Editor charter

2006-03-17 13:42:27

On  16 Mar 2006, at 18:06, Leslie Daigle wrote:
Following the note just sent about the proposed timeline for
reviewing the RFC Editor contract this year, here is the
STRAW proposal RFC Editor charter proposed by the IAB.

It is a modest extension of the RFC Editor paragraph as found
in RFC 2850 (the IAB Charter).

The purpose of this straw proposal is to inform discussions
scheduled for the GENAREA meeting at IETF65 in Dallas.
After the Dallas meeting, the IAB will provide a more formal
charter proposal.

STRAW RFC Editor Charter

The RFC Editor executes editorial management for the publication of the
"Request for Comment" (RFC) document series, which is the permanent
document repository of the IETF community.

It is a bug that the scope of the RFC Editor, which for decades
has been the broader Internet community, has above been limited
to just "the IETF community".  For openers, the IRTF and IAB
are not properly part of the IETF, though they are obviously
related and co-operative.  More broadly though, the RFC Editor
has handled Internet documents that had nothing to do with the
IETF for many years now.  It would be a mistake to narrow the
RFC Editor's scope as the above sentence appears to do.

Proposed edit:
        s/of the IETF community/of the Internet community/

The RFC series
constitutes the archival publication channel for Internet Standards
and for other contributions by the Internet research and engineering
community. RFCs are available free of charge to anyone via the
Internet. It is the responsibility of the IAB to approve the
appointment of an organization to act as RFC Editor and the general
policy followed by the RFC Editor.

Policies, including those for defining publication tracks and
their requirements, intellectual property rights, as well as
editorial review and approval processes,  must be defined in
IETF community consensus documents before being put to the IAB for
approval.

Similarly, it is a bug that the IETF process would govern the
publication of non-IETF documents.  The IETF process properly
should govern how IETF generated documents should be handled
for publication.  However, the IETF processes ought not govern
how IRTF, IAB, or other non-IETF documents are handled by the
RFC Editor.

When the current IAB/IESG organisational structure was setup,
it was a deliberate choice to have the RFC Editor under the IAB
and not under the IESG -- because the RFC Editor's scope was
(and is) much larger than the IETF or the IESG's scope.  Requiring
that all policies have to go through the IETF processes (which
many IETF people consider badly wedged) for approval is a major
and undesirable change, IMHO.

Yours,

Ran
rja(_at_)extremenetworks(_dot_)com

Disclaimer: Employed by, but not speaking for, Extreme Networks.


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