Subject: Fwd: I-D Action: draft-carpenter-whats-an-author-00.txt

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2015 16:49:37 +1200

This is intended to frame the discussion we've been having.
Comments/criticisms welcome.

   Brian

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: I-D Action: draft-carpenter-whats-an-author-00.txt
Date: Thu, 23 Apr 2015 21:33:25 -0700
From: [email-masked]
Reply-To: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.

        Title           : What is an Author of an IETF Stream Draft?
        Author          : Brian Carpenter
	Filename        : draft-carpenter-whats-an-author-00.txt
	Pages           : 4
	Date            : 2015-04-23

Abstract:
   This draft suggests guidelines for assigning authorship in IETF
   Internet-Drafts.  It also discusses the related issues of named
   contributors and acknowledgements.

The IETF datatracker status page for this draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-carpenter-whats-an-author/

There's also a htmlized version available at:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-carpenter-whats-an-author-00

Please note that it may take a couple of minutes from the time of submission
until the htmlized version and diff are available at tools.ietf.org.

Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP at:
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/

_______________________________________________
I-D-Announce mailing list
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Internet-Draft directories: http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html
or ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf/1shadow-sites.txt

---

From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2015 07:41:31 +0200

Hi Brian,

this draft seems to assume you can have editors, or authors, but not a
combination of those.  The practice has been different, with people
taking editorship roles on drafts that do have original authors which
just have tried to extract themselves from the tedious wordsmithing
consensus process.  Do you argue for changing that practice?

(As usual, I will be arguing for properly acknowledging authorship, as
doing otherwise is non-inclusive for academics.  E.g., RFC 3819 has done
exactly the right thing.)

Grüße, Carsten

---

From: t.p. <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2015 09:40:00 +0100

Brian

For me, you are implicitly changing the way in which Working Groups
operate best, in that once an I-D is adopted by a WG, then change
control should reside in the Working Group [RFC2418] and the I-D should
be EDITED accordingly.  That is, there is always an editor at that point
and their name is likely to be on the first page, often at the top.

Who has contributed and how much is a separate question, for me, and may
have been decided even before a WG adopts an I-D.

And this blurring of editorship and authorship I think leads to poor
Working Group practice, when the person with the idea writes the initial
I-D, keeps control when the WG adopts the I-D and makes changes as and
when they think fit without sufficient discussion or consensus on the
list.  I see this more often than I like and think that it slows down
the process and leads to an I-D that suits that person and - may be -
comes unstuck later such as at IETF Last Call or IETF Review when there
is sufficient independent review to call out the inadequacies.

I think that getting the process right is more important for the IETF
than giving people their citations.

Tom Petch

---

From: Loa Andersson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2015 15:12:38 +0200

> than giving people their citations.

My point was that the process works reasonably well on a working group 
level, only that it is different per working group!

I doubt that there is any value in trying to stream lining all wg's.

/Loa

-- 

Loa Andersson                        email: [email-masked]
Senior MPLS Expert                          [email-masked]
Huawei Technologies (consultant)     phone: +46 739 81 21 64

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2015 09:40:11 -0400

--On Friday, April 24, 2015 09:40 +0100 "t.p."
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> Brian
> 
> For me, you are implicitly changing the way in which Working
> Groups operate best, in that once an I-D is adopted by a WG,
> then change control should reside in the Working Group
> [RFC2418] and the I-D should be EDITED accordingly.  That is,
> there is always an editor at that point and their name is
> likely to be on the first page, often at the top.

For whatever it is worth, that model is fairly close to the one
that Jon Postel preferred for many years.  In essence, there
would normally be one name at the top of the page and that name
would identify the person who held the pen at the time of
publication.  There was always flexibility about special
circumstances, but one responsible author/editor was the
assumption.

Things have obviously changed.  We have gotten the name or names
on the first page tied up with questions of attribution, IPR
issues, the entirely different conventions of more
academic/scholarly and formal publications and carryover of
assumptions from other communities more broadly, and with
compensation and performance review polices in a number of
companies.  I'd like to go back; I don't see how.

>...
> I think that getting the process right is more important for
> the IETF than giving people their citations.

Well, I do too and I hope and assume Brian would agree.
However...

* I think the authorship example you cited (and that I elided to
save space), should it actually be a problem, is a sign of poor
WG management by Chairs and ADs.  It raises some other issues,
such as whether a WG (or the IETF generally) should be taking on
work when there is only person who is willing (or perceived as
able) to hold the pen on a document.  Or maybe it is a sign that
things are just fine: as Loa points out, WGs are different.
However, if the name(s) on an I-D are an important issue in WG
management, that is almost always a symptom of a problem, not a
basic issue.  

* Unless we make format and structural changes to make it a lot
more obvious that they are really different, I think having
different rules about authorship for different streams, or even
between WG and individual submission documents within the IETF
stream, would be a mistake that would come back to haunt us.  I
think it is entirely appropriate to have the different streams
make judgments about edge cases and cases of controversies, but
the overall policies and definitions affect the integrity of the
RFC Series and hence must be under the control of the RSE rather
than a property of, e.g., how the IETF manages its workflow.

best,
     john

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2015 07:43:50 -0700

> that Jon Postel preferred for many years.  

I'm sure that over the years, many participants in the world of RFCs
have held many different preferences on this topic, as for all others.
However the running code of RFCs has regularly demonstrated multiple
authors for RFCs and essentially from the beginning, starting with RFC
31 and RFC 44...

Also, to the extent the current effort cares about prior treatments of
the question of author vs. editor, please take a look at a rather more
recent bit of text that went through IETF approval:

   https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7221#section-3

d/
-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net

---

From: Andy Bierman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2015 10:11:42 -0700

> than giving people their citations.

Agreed.

IMO, an author is somebody willing to work on the draft all the way
through RFC publication.  It is easy to throw out some initial
ideas.  The effort needed to reach consensus and correct precise text
is a lot harder.

Initial co-authors unwilling to do that should be moved to the
contributor section.

> Tom Petch

Andy

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2015 14:12:55 -0400

John C Klensin <[email-masked]> wrote:
    > Things have obviously changed.  We have gotten the name or names on the
    > first page tied up with questions of attribution, IPR issues, the
    > entirely different conventions of more academic/scholarly and formal
    > publications and carryover of assumptions from other communities more
    > broadly, and with compensation and performance review polices in a
    > number of companies.  I'd like to go back; I don't see how.

If we can come up with a way of providing attribution in a way that Tenure
Committees understand, then I don't care what goes on page 1.

(And if Tenure Committees understand, then I think that will likely solve
the problems of other communities.)

--
Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>, Sandelman Software Works
 -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2015 11:36:16 -0700

>    https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7221#section-3

I should also have pointed people to:

   WG Guidelines & Procedures
   https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-crocker-rfc2418bis-wgguidelines-00

including roughly the latter half of:

   2.  Basic Structure and Requirements

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-crocker-rfc2418bis-wgguidelines-00#section-2

and all of:

   6.  Staff Roles

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-crocker-rfc2418bis-wgguidelines-00#section-6

FWIW, a simple change that we could institute without any fanfare is
some conventions for citing in the Acknowledgements section people who
filled particular roles, in the development process.  Chair, Secretary,
whatever.  Arguably we've been highly remiss in not doing this all along.

d/

---

From: Yoav Nir <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2015 22:14:26 +0300

> On Apr 24, 2015, at 9:12 PM, Michael Richardson <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> 

Getting too many names on the author list of a paper is an issue in the Academic world where these tenure committees work:

http://berkeleysciencereview.com/too-many-authors/

Granted, it’s usually not this bad in computer science. The acknowledgement section sometimes contains the names of people whose contribution is correcting a spelling mistake, or trying to implement the spec and sending a message to the list that it looks like it works. I don’t think tenure committees can make decisions based on that. 

If we wanted something they could work with, we’d need to differentiate substantial from non-substantial contributions, and that makes the work harder. Both editors and chairs like to be  "hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.” Adding someone’s name to the acknowledgement section is cheap and helps with getting consensus. Having to score people on the weight of their contribution will subvert the IETF process for the benefit of tenure committees and corporate performance reviews.

Yoav

---

From: Joe Touch <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2015 11:42:15 -0700

Brian,

This document is long overdue, and I appreciate your tackling it.

There are some additional issues that you should address explicitly,
IMO. Some are discussed on various authorship guideline pages, such as:
http://www.apa.org/research/responsible/publication/

IMO, it might be useful to cite a few of them as they help underscore
that you're basically expecting our community to follow generally
accepted best-practices for attribution.

The issues I didn't yet see discussed:

	- including authorship for a key intellectual contribution,
	e.g., a mechanism, algorithm, etc.
		the doc currently focuses on written text, diagrams,
		and code, but there are contributions beyond that

	- excluding authorship primarily motivated by only:

		- funding support (giving author to a financial
			sponsor only because of their financial
			support)

		- placation (giving authorship as a "cookie" to
			gain consensus or overcome objection)

		- promotion (giving authorship to improve the
			credibility or reputation of the doc)

		- work or WG relationship (giving authorship to
			a supervisor, academic advisor, etc.)

I do think the negative examples are important. Dancing around the issue
doesn't help.

Joe

---

From: joel jaeggli <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2015 11:33:47 -0700

> the problems of other communities.)

insofar as I am aware tenure committies have never looked at
standardization activities with much favor and I don't think anything
here will change that.

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2015 17:18:58 -0400

--On Thursday, April 30, 2015 11:33 -0700 joel jaeggli
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>> (And if Tenure Committees understand, then I think that will
>> likely solve the problems of other communities.)
> 
> standardization activities with much favor and I don't think
> anything here will change that.

That is certainly consistent with my experience and
observations.  If we are correct, then changing things in the
RFC Series in an attempt to impress such committees falls into
the category of "fool's errands", and we should concentrate more
on what works for the Series and the Standards Process.

    john