Subject: Number of authors on RFCs

From: George Swallow <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 10:04:40 -0500

ADs -

There is a good deal of confusion and strife over the issue of how
many authors can be on an RFC.  While I applaud the effort to reverse
the trend of piling on authors simplu to demonstrate support for a
proposal, the current situation is unacceptable.  As a workgroup chair
and as an individual working in a number of workgroup it would appear
that there is no consistent policy on this, and that the limits tend
to vary from AD to AD.  I've been told "about six".  Another workgroup
chair has been told three.  But this month, among the RFCs published,
one has 9 authors (3246), one has 7 authors (3248), and one has 5
authors (3253).

Thus the policy (or really lack of policy) is somewhat capricious and
arbitrary.  I believe the IESG owes it to the community to set forth
clear guidelines on this with a clear rationale for those limits.

I clearly understand the need to limit the number of individuals who
are responsible for a document as it proceeds through the final steps
of approval.   I also sympathize with the notion of authors being
listed on the cover page and having that be a single page.

It is a difficult process to cut down on the number of authors after a
document has been worked on for several years.  In the case of GMPLS,
many have made substative contributions.  Deciding who has done enough
to be "an author" and who is just acknowledged after so much time (and
in this case great cooperation and lively technical debate) can be
painful and could be disruptive of future cooperation.

In the case GMPLS, something that would be acceptable to all of us is
the following.

1. List just the editor on the cover.  The editor serves as a single
   point of contact for the RFC-editor and the IESG review.

2. Note in the abstract and/or introduction that the document was the
   collaboration of an extensive number of people.

3. List all of the authors in the author section.

I've been told that this will not fly.  But I fail to see how such a
proposal fails to serve the community.  It certainly meets the goals I
listed above.  Perhaps there are goals that I am unaware of.

In any event, the community needs clear guidelines and a clear
rationale for them.  

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

...George

======================================================================
George Swallow          Cisco Systems                   (978) 497-8143
                        250 Apollo Drive
                        Chelmsford, Ma 01824

---

From: RJ Atkinson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 10:45:12 -0500

> 3. List all of the authors in the author section.

George,

	I think that would fly (and indeed should become the common
practice all around IMHO) if item 1 were edited to read:

1. List just the editor on the cover and explicitly note that
    the person is the editor on the cover [1].  Editor serves as a
    single point of contact for RFC Editor and IESG Review.

AND item 3 were changed to read:

3. List the Editor in an EDITOR section.   Do not have a separate
    AUTHOR section.  In the document's acknowledgements [2], list
    (in alphabetical order) each person who contributed text
    to the document.

	Also, I'll note that the policy on limiting long author lists
originates from the RFC Editor rather than from IAB or IESG
(though the latter groups support the RFC Editor on this topic).

Cheers,

Ran
[email-masked]

[1] RFC-2825's cover page is a good example of this.

[2] RFC-1341 has an example of a long list of contributors
     in an ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS section.

---

From: Pete Resnick <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 09:50:08 -0600

On 3/26/02 at 10:04 AM -0500, George Swallow wrote:

>In the case GMPLS, something that would be acceptable to all of us 
>is the following.
>
>2. Note in the abstract and/or introduction that the document was 
>the collaboration of an extensive number of people.
>
>I've been told that this will not fly.

I'm sure that #3 is the problem. You can feel free to list all of the 
authors in the acknowledgements section, even separating them out as 
the main authors with grand fanfare and noting the rest of the 
contributors in a list below them. Something like:
-----
Acknowledgements

Although Jane Smith served as the editor of this document, the 
substance of the document was written by the following ten co-authors 
who each contributed significant amounts of text to the document:

John Jones, ABC Corporation

Mary Black, XYZ University

...

Jerry Johns, 123 Inc.

The editor and the authors would also like to thank the following 
members of the NUTS working group for all of their commentary and 
contributions to the document:

Andy Anderson, Bertha Brown, Charles Carson, .....
-----

Nothing stops you from formatting the acknowledgements however you 
like. The problem is that the author section refers to who is on the 
top of the page and indicates the point of contact for the document.

Change #3 to "List all of the authors with special note in the 
acknowledgements section" and you should be fine.

pr
-- 
Pete Resnick <mailto:[email-masked]>
QUALCOMM Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102

---

From: Andy Bierman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 08:04:08 -0800

>many authors can be on an RFC.  While I applaud the effort to reverse

In the RMONMIB WG, the trend of piling on authors continues.
A recent individual submission listed 5 authors, and 4 from the
same company. If and when this I-D becomes a WG document, these
people expect to remain as authors.

I wouldn't characterize the problem as serious, but it would be
nice to reverse this trend somehow.

Andy

---

From: "RL 'Bob' Morgan" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 08:40:29 -0800 (PST)

I agree with Ran's amendment to George's recipe, but I think in practice
document evolution makes this difficult to set up from the beginning.  
That is, I think many documents start out with one or two authors, and
these people are legitimately "authors" in that they wrote the text of the
document (obviously many contribute ideas in almost all cases).  Then
people comment, including some who provide amounts of text significant
enough to rival the original authors, hence it seems only right to
consider them "authors" too.  At a certain point, perhaps four or five or
six, listing all authors becomes unwieldy or unseemly (hence the RFC
Editor complaints) and the person or persons now in charge of the document
become "editors" of a large set of text contributions.  This seems like a
common process, but it's hard for an original author to determine when
they cease being an author and become an editor (I've had to fight with
someone about this very point, who felt that "editor" somehow diminished
their role).  But it's just odd to say that the sole writer of text for a
document should be labelled "editor".  People won't do it.

So a further amended recipe might say this, along the lines of:

 (a)  if a document has one or two contributors of text, using "author" is 
fine;

 (b)  once a document has five or more contributors of text, using 
"editor" is appropriate, and text contributors should be acknowledged in 
the document;

 (c)  in between, it's up to the discretion of authors and WG chairs.

 - RL "Bob"

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 12:05:24 -0500

At 08:40 AM 3/26/02 -0800, RL 'Bob' Morgan wrote:
>But it's just odd to say that the sole writer of text for a

I think they will - some large telecomm companies are now offering
bonuses to employees who publish RFCs, which is another source of
the problem.  The risk here is that people who would have formerly
been identified as authors but won't be under the new system would
stop contributing, but I hope it's rare that those people actually
have that much to contribute to start with.  I know of at least
a few people who've made near careers of getting their names on 
other people's work by making fairly trivial additions but just
enough to get their name on the author list.  They'll have 3 or 10
or however many RFCs published without ever having brought in original
work.  That's probably not a good thing.

I don't think it's that difficult to identify documents which will
have significant collaboration, and I'd be hard-pressed to think of
a working group document that won't.  In midcom, we're starting
with the assumption that the holder of the responsible-for-the-document
token is an editor, not an author.

I used to be very interested in the whole question of author representation
and actually did some work on variation in title page appearances about 
20 years ago (yikes).  People are listed on title pages for a variety
of reasons:

1) it's good for the author
2) it's good for the publication/publisher
3) it's good for readers

I think it's pretty clearly the case that listing a bunch of authors
falls under the category of 1 and only indirectly falls under the
category of 2 (it's good [arguably] to have more participation, which
being liberal in crediting contribution would tend to encourage).  I
also think that it's absolutely bad for researchers, in that it tends
to increase the amount of stuff that's found in response to a search
but tends to decrease its relevance.

Personally, I tend to think that a thorough acknowledgements section
is a good thing and certainly sufficient for recognizing marginal
contributions.

Melinda

---

From: RJ Atkinson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 13:34:39 -0500

On Tuesday, March 26, 2002, at 11:40 , RL 'Bob' Morgan wrote:

> consider them "authors" too.

	A (controversial) alternative approach to this is to simply
say that all IETF WG standards-track documents have an EDITOR (and
no AUTHOR section), even if there is only ever one primary EDITOR
in the life of a standards-track document.  As at present, there
would be wide flexibility in giving credit in an ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
section.

	In the vast majority of cases, one's original personal I-D
benefits from the inputs/ideas of many many folks in the WG.
Also, having EDITOR for WG documents is not inconsistent with
the way things work in other fora (e.g. IEEE 802, ITU-T), so
ought not be a total shock to folks.

	I'm not sure that RFC Editor is on the wgchairs list, so
I'm CC'ing them (and suggest that others also do that unless
RFC Editor asks otherwise or the thread moves off the current
topic).

Ran
[email-masked]

---

From: "James Kempf" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 11:22:56 -0800

Something like this was done in the draft-guttman-rfc2608bis-01.txt, the
SLPv2bis draft.

        jak

---

From: "James Kempf" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 11:18:32 -0800

George,

I tried to get some reduction in author list size in Seamoby last fall
and I got considerable pushback from the WG. The problem is that many
people involved in the IETF are evaluated by their employers based on
their authorship of Internet drafts (this is the case for my employer
for example). Thus, by relegating them to the Acknowledgements section,
we endanger their ability to participate in IETF work. I'm not arguing
that author list should be allowed to bloat, just that there are some
practical considerations about why they are bloating.

            jak

---

From: "Carl" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 11:54:25 -0800

Hi guys,

I have followed this debate with interest and would like to give you my view
as chair of the IPP WG for the last 4-5 years.

In our WG, which has produced over 20 documents, not counting a few dafts
that have been dropped along the way, we have typically 3-5 listed authors
per document. There are several reasons for this:

1) The duration of the project means that people who started off being
authors or editors have moved to other things and new people have had to
take over to finish a particular document. You obviously don't want to leave
out somebody who worked for years and on several versions of a draft,
because they had to leave the project. Also, you cannot leave out the people
who actually helped finishing a particular document if they have also spent
considerable effort on it.

2) If you decide to combine two drafts into one, you cannot easily start
prioritizing one set of authors over the other to reduce the number of
authors.

3) In our case, we have often had different people fulfilling the role as
authors (contributing technical stuff) and editors (who insure that all
documents are written in a similar style and do not contain contradictory
statements or terminology).

4) In the final round, our main editor for the project has put all the
drafts through a last check for consistency and style.

Some technically savvy content contributors, are not necessarily also good
tech writers, and in some cases they have to struggle with English as a
second, or even third or fourth, language. So we need both good technical
contributors as well as editors that can help craft the drafts into
consistent and high quality English.

I don't think we can leave out one cathegory of contributors over the other,
we need both. This is speaking against suggestions to have only ONE author
listed. I could go along with having one document EDITOR listed, but
maintain that significant technical contributors should also be listed as
AUTHORS. Seeing their name on the front page of an RFC is often a strong
motivation for people to contribute, remember that we don't pay these people
anything, author listing is one of the few carrots that we have...
Obviously, you still have to be critical about who qualifies as an author,
just getting a few wording changes does not count in my book.

Carl-Uno Manros

10701 S Eastern Ave #1117
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Tel +1-702-617-9414
Fax +1-702-617-9417
Mob +1-310-251-7103
Email [email-masked]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf
> Of RJ Atkinson
> Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2002 10:35 AM
> To: RL 'Bob' Morgan
> Cc: RFC Editor; [email-masked]; [email-masked]

---

From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 13:25:59 -0800

At 08:40 AM 3/26/2002, RL 'Bob' Morgan wrote:
>it's just odd to say that the sole writer of text for a
>document should be labelled "editor".

if one person wrote the text of a document, in what sense is anyone else an 
author?

---

From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 13:25:54 -0800

At 07:04 AM 3/26/2002, George Swallow wrote:
>I believe the IESG owes it to the community to set forth

actually, it's the RFC Editor's policy, so it should be the RFC Editor, I 
should think.

Having recently been through such a go-round with the RFC Editor, I think 
their policy is far looser than a simple numeric value would suggest. I was 
on a draft with 17 other folks (or something like that), and the RFC Editor 
asked us to "reduce that". They offered suggestions like

(a) list one or two as editors and acknowledge inputs from the rest
(b) list a few as authors and acknowledge inputs from the rest
(c) include a "contributor's" section

We wound up with a variant of (b). But the RFC Editor never said "it has to 
be <= N", only that having more authors than there were pages in the 
document was a trifle bizarre.

---

From: "James Kempf" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 13:26:02 -0800

Ran/all,

I have had a number of IETF members approach me with the suggestion that
standards track document have *no* author, as is done in 3GPP and other
standards bodies. The idea here is that it would avoid all the problems
that have been discussed here, and people bidding to be on the document
as editor just to get their name on some important piece of technology.

We had this problem in Seamoby regarding paging. Some people viewed the
charter item as an opportunity to get their name associated with a new
basic Internet mobility technology, and rather than contribute to the
technical discussion, they chose to constantly raise process comments,
whose single point was to modify the process so that their authored
contributions were in a position to become the standards track RFC.

Is there any history as to why IETF standards have explicitly listed
authors?

            jak

----- Original Message -----
From: "RJ Atkinson" <[email-masked]>
To: "RL 'Bob' Morgan" <[email-masked]>
Cc: "RFC Editor" <[email-masked]>; <[email-masked]>;
<[email-masked]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2002 10:34 AM
Subject: Re: Number of authors on RFCs

---

From: Joseph Reagle <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 17:38:04 -0500

On Tuesday 26 March 2002 16:25, Fred Baker wrote:
> their policy is far looser than a simple numeric value would suggest. I
> was on a draft with 17 other folks (or something like that), and the RFC
> Editor asked us to "reduce that". They offered suggestions like
>

One of the nuanced bits is setting the contributors' expectations from the 
start. No one likes to have their work "unfairly" deprecated. Consequently, 
in xmldsig we tried to define the various levels/thresholds and criteria.

http://www.w3.org/Signature/Contributor.html

-- 

Joseph Reagle Jr.                 http://www.w3.org/People/Reagle/
W3C Policy Analyst                mailto:[email-masked]
IETF/W3C XML-Signature Co-Chair   http://www.w3.org/Signature/
W3C XML Encryption Chair          http://www.w3.org/Encryption/2001/

---

From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2002 14:16:04 -0800

At 01:26 PM 3/26/2002, James Kempf wrote:
>Is there any history as to why IETF standards have explicitly listed authors?

It's not so much "IETF standards" as "RFCs". Individuals write them, and 
need to be able to be contacted later. One can argue that this should 
change - you are suggesting that - but that is the fundamental issue as to 
where we have been.

---

From: RJ Atkinson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2002 09:54:49 -0500

> Is there any history as to why IETF standards have explicitly listed

RFCs have always had either a listed AUTHOR section or
a listed EDITOR section, going back to RFC-1.  RFC Editor
is probably best placed to describe the history.

Ran