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Re: Guidelines for authors and reviewers

2008-06-03 10:57:00
Hi Paul,

Paul Hoffman wrote:
Agree. And this topic (the recipient list of the review) is something 
I think hard about before I send out any review.

That's good to hear, but I didn't see it reflected in the document; 
maybe your co-authors had a different slant. Regardless, my preference 
is to encourage group communication during reviews for anything other 
than editorial nits and "I was told to read this; I did; it was fine" 
reviews. Group communication, in both directions for a review, helps 
everyone. It also helps prevent a WG hearing that "I changed this thing 
we had all agreed to because I was told to by { a security person | an 
IAB member | an ex-AD | ... }". Those kinds of changes tend to make a 
document weaker if they aren't agreed to and possibly modified by the WG 
who worked on the document.

I will add the following text regarding this in a new section 4.2 before 
the current section 4.2.

***************************START OF TEXT********************************
4.2 Recipients of the review

The list of recipients of the review is tricky to get right. The main 
idea is to make sure all the relevant people receive the review. The 
recipient list is determined mainly by the following factors

* The timeframe of the review (early vs. late)
* The contents of the review (editorial vs. technical)

Early reviews are usually performed by active participants of a working 
group. The preferred destination for these reviews is the working group 
mailing list since it can be reasonably assumed that the persons 
interested in the document are subscribed to the mailing list. This 
applies for both technical and editorial issues. Alternately editorial 
issues can be resolved using a private mail to the author(s).

Late reviews are usually performed by persons who are not active 
participants of the working group and who usually review the draft from 
a different point of view than the working group. If the contents of the 
review are mainly editorial in nature, the reviews can be sent just to 
the authors, the working group chair(s), the document shepherd(s). If 
the review is of a more technical nature it is considered polite to 
include the working group mailing list and/or the IETF discussion list. 
As it is not reasonable to assume that the reviewer will subscribe to 
the working group mailing list just for discussing this issue, the 
working group chair(s) need to make sure that this review will get past 
any moderation controls imposed on non-subscribers by the working group 
mailing list.
****************************END OF TEXT*********************************

Would this resolve your concern?

Thanks
Suresh

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