Being an editor - a personal take

["Mark Day" <markday@cisco.com>]

People have asked what it means to be an editor, and I think it's worth
clarifying in case people are confused about having to be an editor to
participate.

Curiously, this topic does not appear to be covered in either RFC 2026
(http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2026.txt) or in the Tao of the IETF
(http://www.ietf.org/tao.html), so I'm afraid I have to provide my personal
opinions and observations.  I'd welcome a pointer to some other description
of what it means to be an editor of a document in the IETF.

Here are what I see as the core duties of an editor:
(1) safeguarding the source document
(2) accurately capturing proposed changes in the document
(3) restructuring or rephrasing when necessary to produce a usable document
(4) periodically producing new versions and posting them publicly (to
internet-drafts)

Item (2) means an editor has to be able to follow the technical discussion
as it affects a given document, both on the mailing list and in face-to-face
meetings.  Item (3) means that an editor also needs to be able to write
clear technical prose and know how to organize the whole document.  It is
surprisingly common as discussions evolve that documents split, merge, or
get completely rearranged.

The editor does not have to write all the text.  Often an editor writes a
first skeletal version of a document and others contribute missing pieces.
Other times, the editor is basically making all the changes to reflect
concerns and corrections. The editor also needs to track contributions to
the documents and decide who should be credited as an author and who should
be acknowledged in the document.

The editors of the documents that came from the Content Alliance work have
used Marshall Rose's system for generating RFC-formatted text and HTML from
an XML source file.  Our general experience with that system has been good,
and I would strongly encourage editors of new documents to stay with that
practice. The relevant documentation is RFC 2629, and the software is at
http://xml.resource.org

Questions and comments welcome, as usual.  I'd especially welcome reactions
from any people who've edited documents within an IETF working group and
think I'm not describing the process accurately.

--Mark