Subject: A couple of opinion pieces

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2019 16:24:18 +1200

Hi,

The first document is early input to the 2019-2020 NomCom and to
all those thinking of volunteering for it, or for any of the
open leadership positions:

Some Thoughts on IETF Community Leadership
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-carpenter-community-leaders-01

The second one is also relevant to NomCom, but also to those who
will be involved in the process of identifying the future RFC Series
Editor, and to those who care about the IETF standards process in general:

Request for Comments
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-carpenter-request-for-comments-01

Comments are most welcome, but these documents are both personal opinions.
 
Regards
   Brian Carpenter

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2019 10:56:19 -0400

Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]> wrote:
    > The second one is also relevant to NomCom, but also to those who will
    > be involved in the process of identifying the future RFC Series Editor,
    > and to those who care about the IETF standards process in general:

    > https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-carpenter-request-for-comments-01

Brian,
  I cannot disagree with any of your analysis, but I failed to find an
actionable conclusion.

  About:
     Finally, the usage of the RFC subseries designated "FYI", "STD", or
     "BCP" has had limited success.  "FYI" has been dropped, "STD" is
     fairly useless as it is only applied to full Internet standards
     (despite proposals to widen it, as mentioned above), and "BCP" has
     been reasonably successful.

We have *NOT* made it easy to reference STDXXXX or BCPXXXX in *our*
documents.  This seems to be both a tooling issue, but also a review
issue.   We have not overcome our own internal inertia on this, so how can we
expect others to do so?   I think we should try again, harder.

I think that we need to reach out to other places where our documents are
referenced, and try to get them to use the right kind of reference.

As part of the format revision, I think that it is time to reconsider our
stance that the old documents are completely and totally immutable.

As a metaphore,  I point to the COSE protocol (not the document itself) which
   explicitely has a  both "protected" (under signature) and
   "unprotected" (not under signature) attributes (CMS really has the same
   thing, just less obvious).

This is the model we should adopt: there are immutable *parts* of the txt/html
files, and mutable parts.  {Actually, we can re-sign it all}.

I'm okay if that means we have, for instance, RFC0822.v2.txt that differs
only in that it has a forward reference to RFC2822.  I'm also okay that we
insert URLs at the top of all the existing txt files that point towards the
errata web pages.  I'd rather put that as metadata into the signature, but
nobody would think to look there.

I'd like to suggest that the IETF Trust try to clean up some of the places
where there are not good references back to the IETF (to rfc-editor.org, and
errata), such as:
   https://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc1341/7_2_Multipart.html

--
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