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Re: Proper credit for work done -- on finding chairs (was CHANGE THE JOB)

2013-10-18 12:57:38

--On Friday, October 18, 2013 10:13 -0400 Andrew Sullivan
<ajs(_at_)anvilwalrusden(_dot_)com> wrote:

No hat.

On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 06:52:11PM -0400, John C Klensin wrote:
I wonder if we should be publishing, at regular intervals,
RFCs with explicit acknowledgements and maybe contact
information for Areas and ADs, WG Chairs, and, if
appropriate, other IETF functionaries, probably including
document reviewers and Nomcom members.

Hi.

I'm not going to spend much energy defending that idea.  If it
seems useful, fine.  If not, drop it.  

So one comment-message and then I'll stop

I'm not keen on adding this cruft to the RFC series.  I note
that the tools pages are now archived, so if you go to
http://tools.ietf.org/wg/dnsext you will find that it's
concluded and that Olafur and I were chair at the end.  What
you _won't_ find is the history of other chairs.  Maybe that's
an issue?

On the other hand, isn't this what resumes are for?

It depends on one's purpose.  If you put in your resume that you
chaired that WG, and some wants to verify that, the tools pages
are fine.  If Olaf does, he is probably in trouble and that is
one of several reasons why one might want a back trace (but
doesn't justify an RFC).  On the other hand, if someone wanted
to know which WGs you had chaired since you started
participating in the IETF, that had better be in your resume
because trying to find it from the tools pages (even with Chair
history as well as Charter history) would be a little tedious.
(I just noticed that information isn't in my CV; maybe it should
be.)

If I'm working for a company than is credit-happy, or if I have
a boss who wants to see my name in print to justify my job,
salary, or next meeting costs, I'm perhaps likely to prefer
something a little more solid and archival.

As far as academic, etc., credit is concerned, part of what
stimulated the idea was the practice in several journals of
publishing an annual list of reviewers, partially to give credit
while keeping the reviewer-article binding confidential.   The
analogy isn't terribly good, but...

Could we do the same job by making sure that WG Chairs,
Shepherds, ADs, and other folks who move the work along are
acknowledged?  I don't know, although I agree that being
somewhat better about those sorts of acknowledgements would be a
good idea (and I just modified the template I use to remind me
to do that).  Barry might go ask whomever raised the issue what
would or would not help.

As to simply listing everyone as a co-author or otherwise on the
front page, first of all, the reason for the "tradition" was a
strong conviction that the listed person should be a real
author, document consolidator/ editor, and/or what we sometimes
call the "holder of the pen" _and_ the primary contact
person(s).   For a given document, the number of those people is
rarely more than one or two.  In that context, "five" was a
concession and everyone else goes either into Acknowledgments or
a "Contributors" section (another concession).  Do we want to go
to listing everyone in sight, including people's managers, their
managers, and perhaps their kindergarten teachers, as authors?
I hope not, but that is just my personal bias.  If nothing else,
we are doing (largely) standards and protocol specifications
here, not scientific papers and the accountability issues are
entirely different.

Or maybe there is an entirely different problem.  I was vastly
amused by a recent posting in a different thread that suggested
that much of the IETF's leadership started their professional
careers around 1987.  I've got a couple of decades on that as
does Steve Crocker who was the first person who posted a note
endorsing the RFC idea.  If the IETF conclusion is that the idea
appeals only to elderly types who didn't grow up with the web
and other modern media, then drop it.  On the other hand, Steve
and I have a tad more experience dealing with these sorts of
issue at a senior management and promotion and budget
justification level than the IETF average, so maybe it is not
_just_ a geriatric reaction.

     john


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