The basic problem is that there is no way to acknowledge all the
folks who helped, for the most general definition of
"contributor". One would have to keep track of every person who made
a comment on the mailing list (whether the particular change ended up
used or not) and everyone who spoke at the meeting.
That is why it is common (but not mandatory) to acknowledge the
working group that worked on the draft. This relates to the
acknowledgement section more than the contributors section.
Acknowledging folks who helped is a good idea. Particularly for a
volunteer organization. But we can not and do not have to be fanatic
about trying to acknowledge everyone.
On a historical note, the acknowledgements section was intended for
folks who wrote pieces, or folks who suggested useful ideas, or
provided significant useful corrections, etc. The contributors
section was introduced in conjunction with the effort to reduce the
set of authors to those who wrote the primary text. So Contributors
is usually used for those who wrote sections of text, but not enough
to be authors. (The debate about whether we should ahve that
distinction is a different discussion, please.) So we actually
should be trying to be careful and thurough about the "contributors"
section, since those are folks who wrote noticeably more than a
single paragraph, and we ought to be able to tell who they are. Even
then, mistakes will be made, and as far as I can tell it is not fatal.
Yours,
Joel M. Halpern
At 07:47 AM 6/7/2006, Spencer Dawkins wrote:
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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