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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 10:00:44
On Wed, 7 Jun 2006, Spencer Dawkins wrote:

Perhaps I lead a sheltered life, but on two of these points...

<snip>

- 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 entire archive of any WG list is saved and available, so comments made to the list are easy to track. Thoughtful comments and reviews published to the list should serve to document individual opinions and contributions. We use list traffic now to document objections, so I don't see why we can't use it to document WG member contributions.

- 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.

Maybe we can say that this is documented via public posting to the list - private comments made off list are just that - private comments.

Spencer

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--
Lucy E. Lynch                           Academic User Services
Computing Center                        University of Oregon
llynch  @darkwing.uoregon.edu           (541) 346-1774

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