Re: Acknowledgements section in a RFC (Was: Last Call: 'Matching of Language Tags' to BCP (draft-ietf-ltru-matching)

["Spencer Dawkins" <spencer at mcsr-labs.org>]

Perhaps I lead a sheltered life, but on two of these points...

> > > - Appendix A - some names seem to be missing. I could quote a small
> > > score of them?
> >
> > I do not know if there are written rules about the "Acknowledgements"
> > or "Credits" section in a RFC. It seems quite variable between the
> > RFCs. I am mentioned in draft-ietf-ltru-matching-14 for what I regard
> > as a very small contribution and not in RFC 4408 where I feel that my
> > contribution is more substantive.
>
> Dear Stephane,
> This may seem trivial, but IMHO quoting every contributor is important for 
> several key reasons.
>
> - the IETF is made of paid and free volunteers. The reward of the free 
> participants is their exposure. If we want top quality participants we 
> must acknowledge their contributions.

This is a real concern (I am a working group draft editor for a draft where 
probably 30 percent of the e-mail I've received on the draft has been about 
acknowledgements). I thought it was a more serious concern for academics and 
consultants, but am now seeing the same concerns from corporate standards 
types and development engineers in other working groups. I have expressed 
this as a concern in private e-mail, but don't know what the answer is.

> - the IPR is to all the co-authors. Every person having contributed a 
> word, a concept, a change, positively or negatively is a co-author. This 
> also has some importance to show the document is not the work of an 
> affinity group (as discussed in RFC 3774) but of a true WG.

In my limited SDO experience, beyond IETF I am most familar with IEEE 802.1 
practice, which is to list "participants" (at least, this is what appears in 
the most recent IEEE 802.1 standard appearing on "Getieee802" at 
http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/download/802.1AB-2005.pdf), where the 
list is "membership at the time of approval", and "balloted at various 
times".

Since we have no clue who the "membership" of an IETF working group is, I 
don't know how to do the equivalent thing here.

Spencer 



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