Re: Policy Statement on RFC authors

["James Kempf" <kempf@docomolabs-usa.com>]

> 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.
>

It may be politically difficult, but I've seen cases where there are
"authors" that have contributed nothing in the final, intensive year of work
finishing an RFC; neither on mailing list commentary, meeting presentations
or text to a document, whose names have gone into the final RFC as authors.
Their only contribution was that they contributed some amount of text to the
original draft, in some cases, over 5 years in the past. I think this is
very unfair to other working group members who actively comment on documents
and who actively participate in working group discussion in the intensive
run up to publishing an RFC.

I'm not sure how much of a problem it really is, but I can see it as being a
demotivating factor: "why should I contribute review and commentary and even
text if my name isn't on the document while Mr. Foo's is and he hasn't done
anything for the WG in years?" Also, as you mention, it makes the task of
identifying who to contact about the document more difficult because the
people who really cared and put work into it prior to publishing are not
necessarily the same as the author list.

            jak