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Document editing and shepherding

A Document Shepherd is an individual who provides working group-level support to improve document-processing throughput and document quality by working in partnership with the responsible Area Director.

RFC 4858 talks about "Document Shepherding from Working Group Last Call to Publication", but there's a significant part of a document's life that happens before working group last call, starting at the time that a working group begins discussing a version of the idea that's been posted as an individual draft. This tutorial discusses the job of the document shepherd, the tasks that might be involved throughout a working group document's lifecycle from start to finish, and the potential for extending document shepherding into earlier stages in that lifecycle.

Slides

Bibliography

  • [1]RFC 4858

    Document Shepherding from Working Group Last Call to Publication

    This document describes methodologies that have been designed to improve and facilitate IETF document flow processing. It specifies a set of procedures under which a working group chair or secretary serves as the primary Document Shepherd for a document that has been submitted to the IESG for publ…