Subject: [Rmt] Re: Authors on draft-ietf-rmt-bb-lct-revised-01

From: Allison Mankin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2006 08:28:37 -0800

Rod,

The only way we succeed with more than 5 authors is if we
explain in a section exactly what each person wrote
in the document.  Usually we try to have the extra people
step down from the top author list if at all possible, though
they stay in the list at the end of the document.

Can you send me a draft of the section that would say
who wrote what in LCT?  I can look and see if it would fly :)
I'm sympathetic, but there are reasons on the other side too.

Allison

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From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Feb 2006 10:32:59 +0200

Thanks for the info Allison

I guess this makes it easier for LCT as the existing RFC has 6 authors
so there must already be a break down of contributions. Likewise Mark is
the only new author and since he's taken on the editorial job for
ALC-revised it's easy to both identify his contribution and justify him
as an author.

ALC may be more of a problem as it had 5 (so no prior audit) and now it
has 6 - and since Mark is the newbie and his editorial work is easy to
justify his contribution this makes for the problem of analysing earlier
authors. However some of the RMT team, including me, were not active in
the early days of LCT and ALC so it would be impossible for us to
identify existing contributions.

The rigid 5 author limit in this case is proving to be bad politics -
both getting justification/audit for contributions made very many moons
ago and removing authors could be painful. Is there another option?

In our FLUTE edits (which has 5 authors named), it is absolutely clear
that the contributions of Sami and Jani Peltotalo go beyond only
contributions - they've done the hardest and most of the work on the
schema (which may be both broken and without 3GPP alignment without
them), and their early implementations and interoperability tests with
Nokia and INRIA improved a great deal of other aspects (e.g. now the
blocking algorithm is in integer arithmetic) as well as the most
editorial review of any RMT contributor which resulted in the kind of
numerous and almost continuous contributions that become completely
integrated to the document. Yet with a 5 author limit it's not possible
to introduce them to the authors' list without bad politics, which is a
terrible shame. In this sense, I greatly sympathise with Mark who's
doing the good (and almost thankless) work of editing several x-revised
documents, but could be lumbered with the horrible job of author
pruning.

For completeness I did a quick check on other "author anomalies" so
hopefully we can minimise pain by doing this in one clean sweep:
- "draft-ietf-rmt-fec-bb-revised" has 3 (1 new) whereas "RFC 3452" has 6
- "draft-ietf-rmt-bb-fec-basic-schemes-revised" has 1 (1 new) whereas
"RFC 3695" has 2
- "draft-ietf-rmt-bb-tfmcc-05" has 2 (1 new) whereas "RFC 3448" has 4

(Getting the "Contributors" sections right is a subject for another
thread another day :)

Cheers, Rod.

>-----Original Message-----
>From: ext Allison Mankin [mailto:[email-masked]] 
>Sent: 20 February, 2006 18:29
>To: Walsh Rod (Nokia-NRC/Tampere)
>Cc: [email-masked]; [email-masked]; [email-masked]
>Subject: [Rmt] Re: Authors on draft-ietf-rmt-bb-lct-revised-01 
>
>Rod,
>
>explain in a section exactly what each person wrote in the 
>document.  Usually we try to have the extra people step down 
>from the top author list if at all possible, though they stay 
>in the list at the end of the document.
>
>Can you send me a draft of the section that would say who 
>wrote what in LCT?  I can look and see if it would fly :) I'm 
>sympathetic, but there are reasons on the other side too.
>
>Allison
>