Re: Policy Statement on RFC authors

[Thomas Narten <narten@us.ibm.com>]

> Questions are still arising about the editorial policies on RFC
> authorship, and the contents of the first page, the Contributors
> section and the Authors' Address section.  We will attempt to clarify.

> 1. When the RFC Editor refers to "authors", we mean exactly the set of
>    names listed on the first page of an RFC.

>    These people are considered to be equally responsible for the
>    contents of the document, and all will be asked to read and approve
>    it before publication.

Note: Some authors do not meet the above criteria because they are not
actively in the loop anymore on the document's contents. However, they
are still authors in the sense that their name goes on the front page
and they would scream vocally if they were no longer considered
authors. They view authorship is critical. This happens fairly often
with WG documents, especially if an author is eased out of their role.

This may also be getting to Randy's point a bit. Overloading "authors"
(those listed on the front of the document) with "the people that must
sign off on the final RFC" is overloading a term that has different
meanings to different people.

I know that even when dealing with IDs, it would be nice to have a way
of identifying who the actual current editor/author as opposed to the
set of authors listed on the front page.

Note also that we have a tradition with (say) revised RFCs often
editted by someone new, but the original authors still listed on the
first page. This is in conflict with the above. Requiring that in
these situations the new author be listed as an editor and the old
authors being listed as contributers (in order to satisfy the above
requirements) would be a bit of a change in running code and the
community might not agree with it.

I wonder if the better way to handle the problem is to make it more
explicit in the document who the key "editors" are that need to sign
off on a document, and having that be a section that gets removed from
the document when it is finally published.

> 2. When the RFC Editor refers to "contributors", we mean people
>    other than the authors, who also contributed significantly to the
>    RFC.  They should be listed in a Contributors section of the body of
>    the document.

For the above case, one could say the former author should become a
contributor. But politically, that is very hard to do in practice in
many cases. I wonder if the community would be happy with such a
general rule.

Thomas