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Re: Acknowledgements section in a RFC (Was: Last Call: 'Matching of Language Tags' to BCP (draft-ietf-ltru-matching)

2006-06-07 04:48:44
Perhaps I lead a sheltered life, but on two of these points...

> - Appendix A - some names seem to be missing. I could quote a small
> score of them?

I do not know if there are written rules about the "Acknowledgements"
or "Credits" section in a RFC. It seems quite variable between the
RFCs. I am mentioned in draft-ietf-ltru-matching-14 for what I regard
as a very small contribution and not in RFC 4408 where I feel that my
contribution is more substantive.

Dear Stephane,
This may seem trivial, but IMHO quoting every contributor is important for several key reasons.

- the IETF is made of paid and free volunteers. The reward of the free participants is their exposure. If we want top quality participants we must acknowledge their contributions.

This is a real concern (I am a working group draft editor for a draft where probably 30 percent of the e-mail I've received on the draft has been about acknowledgements). I thought it was a more serious concern for academics and consultants, but am now seeing the same concerns from corporate standards types and development engineers in other working groups. I have expressed this as a concern in private e-mail, but don't know what the answer is.

- the IPR is to all the co-authors. Every person having contributed a word, a concept, a change, positively or negatively is a co-author. This also has some importance to show the document is not the work of an affinity group (as discussed in RFC 3774) but of a true WG.

In my limited SDO experience, beyond IETF I am most familar with IEEE 802.1 practice, which is to list "participants" (at least, this is what appears in the most recent IEEE 802.1 standard appearing on "Getieee802" at http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/download/802.1AB-2005.pdf), where the list is "membership at the time of approval", and "balloted at various times".

Since we have no clue who the "membership" of an IETF working group is, I don't know how to do the equivalent thing here.

Spencer


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