Subject: Re: Number of authors on RFCs

From: [email-masked] (Sean Doran)
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 20:00:33 +0000 (GMT)

Stupid question: why don't we just completely anonymize all future 
RFCs and possibly even drafts?  

	Sean.

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From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 15:44:41 -0500

>RFCs and possibly even drafts?  

I think that's a good question, actually.  Note that traditional
telecomm bodies like the ITU-T and ETSI do not typically publish
authored documents and yet maintain high levels of participation.
I'm not clear on why RFCs have author contact information in them,
and that may have something to do with whether or not it would be
possible to get rid of author information entirely.

Melinda

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From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 13:35:26 -0800

>RFCs and possibly even drafts?

the issue that arises is where to ask questions. If the IETF wants to keep 
a working group list open forever, that might make sense, but that's not a 
given. Granted that people change jobs and finding them can be an issue, 
but it's another issue.

One could imagine the IETF maintaining a series of aliases (alia?) with 
names like

         [email-masked]

which might in turn redirect traffic to a working group that produced the 
RFC, an author list, or whatever. The author of an RFC would agree to 
maintain his or her address appropriately on the list, so that they are 
always reachable.

There would be a spam question; that could perhaps be addressed by 
generating a random alias name (good for a week or so) and replying to the 
sender with a note that says "I have generated the random alias name 
<name>@ietf.org, please repost your question to that address and I will get 
it to the discuss list." I believe that Henning has or had some software 
that did that.

Alternatively (and this is sort of another topic, but it's 50% relevant), 
might it be interesting for ISOC or IETF to give us [email-masked] or 
[email-masked] addresses that we could use to reflect traffic to our 
current email addresses, and change as we saw fit?

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From: James M Galvin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 23:14:25 -0500 (EST)

On Tue, 26 Mar 2002, Fred Baker wrote:

    the issue that arises is where to ask questions.

    One could imagine the IETF maintaining a series of aliases (alia?)
    with names like

             [email-masked]

    which might in turn redirect traffic ...

    There would be a spam question; ...

Rather than a series of aliases how about just one:

    [email-masked]

A pointer to it could be part of the standard boilerplate, etc.  The
backend could start out manual.  Presumably the Secretariat does keep
track of the mailing lists that went with which working groups, etc.  If
the number of queries got to be too much there are a variety of ways it
could be semi-automated without too much effort.

I could even imagine the ISOC maintaining this information based on the
fact that they hold the copyright.

I don't think the RFC Editor is the right place if the goal is to
respond to queries with a pointer to the appropriate mailing list.

Jim