Subject: [Rfcplusplus] (no subject)

From: "Susan Hares" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2018 13:04:02 -0400

BOF individuals:

I am a part of the independent editors review board.   Members of this board
thought my note to them might be helpful in your discussions.   I will be
attending this BOF. 

Susan Hares 

----------------

Adrian and Heather:

 I've thought a long time before sending in this BOF response.   I apologize
if it comes late in your thinking cycle.

 The real question is who has the authority over the RFC stream as editors
rather than content providers.   IMHO, the social engineering proposed by
the BOF goes against the best practices in most excellent publications
streams - that the group gives general guidance and then trusts the editors
(ISE and RFC editors) to do the right thing with publication.

The real question is does the IETF want to make clear the categorization in
the RFC stream it operates on the following categories (we know and love): 

 Agreed by consensus: Standards (proposed, internet), information,
experimental standards, Best common practices, and historical standards.
Published by (ISE) as non-consensus (aka individual) standards and
information regarding standard.    If we do, then why are we not allowing
the RFC editor and ISE Editor to simply do the "right thing" in making it
clear in a different set of publication streams.

 Micromanaging excellent people is either done by mistake, by inflated ego,
by intent to provide wanton destruction of an organization/process.    I
suspect this statement will be unpopular at the microphone.

Tired of micromanagement by BOFs,

 Sue Hares

---

From: Peter Saint-Andre <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2018 14:41:51 -0600

On 6/20/18 11:04 AM, Susan Hares wrote:
> BOF individuals:
> 
>  
> 
> I am a part of the independent editors review board.   Members of this
> board thought my note to them might be helpful in your discussions.   I
> will be attending this BOF.
> 
>  
> 
> Susan Hares
> 
>  
> 
> ----------------
> 
>  
> 
> Adrian and Heather:
> 
>  I've thought a long time before sending in this BOF response.   I
> apologize if it comes late in your thinking cycle.
> 
>  The real question is who has the authority over the RFC stream as
> editors rather than content providers.   IMHO, the social engineering
> proposed by the BOF goes against the best practices in most excellent
> publications streams - that the group gives general guidance and then
> trusts the editors (ISE and RFC editors) to do the right thing with
> publication.

The phrase "social engineering" brings to mind a certain kind of
psychological manipulation (cf. "social engineering attack"):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_%28security%29

Was that intended?

> The real question is does the IETF want to make clear the categorization
> in the RFC stream it operates on the following categories (we know and
> love):
> 

Those categories are, of course, fairly well-defined in BCP 9.

> Published by (ISE) as non-consensus (aka individual)
> standards and information regarding standard.  

It seems to me that the notion of an "individual standard" borders on an
oxymoron.

> If we do, then why are
> we not allowing the RFC editor and ISE Editor to simply do the "right
> thing" in making it clear in a different set of publication streams.

Would you mind expanding upon your suggestion? I read it as perhaps
saying what I understand the BoF proponents to be saying: we might need
or want to have multiple output streams (IETF, IAB, IRTF, ISE) to
accurately reflect the different natures of the input streams.

>  Micromanaging excellent people is either done by mistake, by inflated
> ego, by intent to provide wanton destruction of an
> organization/process.    I suspect this statement will be unpopular at
> the microphone.

Those are rather strong accusations - so far I have not seen anyone
nihilistically arguing for wanton destruction. And opening up a
perceived problem for community discussion is what we do at the IETF;
that's not exactly micromanagement.

Peter

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2018 11:40:05 +1200

> It seems to me that the notion of an "individual standard" borders on an

True, but probably Sue meant de facto standards. It's worth recalling
that the other SDOs we love to hate, such as ISO and ITU-T, for many
years referred to the IETF's product as "de facto standards". The Internet
has a long and successful history of running on de facto standards.

I greatly fear that worrying too much about what is or isn't officially
blessed as a *real* standard is a clear sign of both hubris and
ossification in the IETF. Ultimately it doesn't matter, I suppose,
because if the IETF ossifies, some new thing will appear to produce the
next generation of de facto standards.

> accurately reflect the different natures of the input streams.

I don't know Sue's answer, but mine (as noted in my draft) is that it
doesn't really matter how large and bright we make the labels on the
documents, because the underlying problem (if there is one) is human
nature. That said, I strongly support using the new RFC format to make
the labels larger and brighter.

> that's not exactly micromanagement.

True, but there are very deep reasons why the current *intentionally
modest* designation of all IETF, IRTF and IAB output as requests to
the wider community for comments has persisted for 50 years and resulted
in a pretty robust network out there. It wasn't an idle choice of
name for the document series, and it shouldn't be casually discarded.

     Brian

---

From: Bob Hinden <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2018 11:40:36 -0700

Brian,

> On Jun 20, 2018, at 4:40 PM, Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> 

I think that’s an excellent suggestion.  We will soon be able to use the new formatting tools to make the status of the document much clearer.   I think that much better than attempting to start new number series for each type of RFC, which I think will only cause more confusion to the community of people us use the RFC series.

Once we decide how to do this using the new formats to do this, I suspect we could change the tools that create html and PDF from the existing base of txt RFCs to make them similarly make the status much clearer.  This approach will do something with the existing RFCs, nothing in the current BOF proposal does that.

Bob

---

From: "Heather Flanagan (RFC Series Editor)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2018 11:57:02 -0700

> Once we decide how to do this using the new formats to do this, I suspect we could change the tools that create html and PDF from the existing base of txt RFCs to make them similarly make the statu…

That has been one of my expectations, that after we had a bit of 
experience with the new format that we could discuss if and how to use 
the new CSS to modify the look of different statuses and/or streams. The 
W3C has some experience with this, though they go as far as to have 
different CSS for everything from drafts to Recommendations and every 
possible point in between.

There are several ways we could approach solving for the confusion 
problem(s). I'd rather make sure we're clear on the problem(s) before 
diving into any particular solution.

-Heather

---

From: "Aaron Falk" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2018 15:00:52 -0400

> the new CSS to modify the look of different statuses and/or streams. 
> The W3C has some experience with this, though they go as far as to 
> have different CSS for everything from drafts to Recommendations and 
> every possible point in between.
>

simple:

if $RFCTYPE = "IndSub" then {
   font-color = "white"
}

---

From: Gonzalo Camarillo <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2018 15:06:15 +0300

Hi,

>> Micromanaging excellent people is either done by mistake, by
>> inflated ego, by intent to provide wanton destruction of an 
>> organization/process.    I suspect this statement will be unpopular
>> at the microphone.
> 
> perceived problem for community discussion is what we do at the
> IETF; that's not exactly micromanagement.

Right, let's focus on discussing the issues at hand *constructively*.
Let's try and avoid accusations that are unlikely to help advance the
conversations we want to have. Thanks!

Cheers,

Gonzalo