2017-08-14-rsoc-minutes
slides-interim-2022-rfcedprog-07-sessa-2017-08-14-rsoc-minutes-00

RFC SERIES OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE (RSOC)
August 14, 2017 RSOC Meeting

Reported by: Cindy Morgan, IETF Secretariat

ATTENDEES
---------------------------------
 Sarah Banks (Chair)
 Nevil Brownlee
 Heather Flanagan (RSE, non-voting)
 Tony Hansen 
 Bob Hinden
 Cindy Morgan (Scribe, non-voting)
 Adam Roach
 Robert Sparks (Lead)
 Martin Thomson

REGRETS
---------------------------------
 Joel Halpern
 Ray Pelletier (IAOC Liaison, non-voting)


NOTES
---------------------------------

0. Review of minutes

  The minutes of the 20 July 2017 RSOC Meeting were approved.

1. Project updates

1.1. Format

  Heather Flanagan reported that a new version of id2xml has been 
  released. 

  Nevil Brownlee noted that there has been some discussion about the SVG 
  style. Adam Roach noted that taking things out of the style section 
  and distributing them as individual elements would solve many of the 
  issues raised. This is out of scope for the current SVGcheck tool, but 
  Heather will follow up to see if there are community volunteers 
  interested in working on this.

  The timeline for the format project tools is being tracked at:
  https://trac.tools.ietf.org/tools/ietfdb/wiki/FormatToolsPlan

1.2. Style Guide

  Heather Flanagan reported that there is an ongoing discussion about 
  abstracts and the Style Guide; this will be covered in more depth in 
  item 2 of this meeting.

1.3. Digital Preservation (MoU with Computer History Museum)

  Heather Flanagan reported that the Computer History Museum is waiting 
  for their lawyer to confirm that there are no conflicts of interest. 
  The MoU is expected to be completed soon.

2. Abstracts 

  An erratum <https://www.rfc-editor.org/errata/eid5076> was submitted 
  recently against the Style Guide that suggested that the guidance in 
  the Style Guide around abstracts was unclear. This errata came out of 
  a larger discussion between regarding the authority of the IESG over 
  editorial matters. 

  Adam Roach said that there is probably some clarification to be had 
  between the IESG and the RFC Editor about whether the IESG is allowed 
  to impose its own editorial constraints before handing a document off 
  to the RFC Editor. Heather Flanagan agreed that there could be more 
  guidance, but noted that it would have to be across all RFC streams. 
  She has sent a message to the stream managers asking for input on 
  proposed changes to the Style Guide.

3. Clarifying the use of "IANA"

  Heather Flanagan reported that there was a question about whether the 
  name of the "IANA Considerations" section of RFCs needed to change. 
  The IETF Trust replied that no change was necessary.

4. RPC SLA 

  Heather Flanagan reported that there was a suggestion at a recent IAB 
  meeting that now might be a good time to re-evaluate the SLA, since it 
  has been in place for almost two years and the RPC has consistently 
  been in Tier 2 or recovering from Tier 2. However, Heather said that 
  after giving this some thought, she does not think that now is the 
  time to re-open this, given that it is still unknown what the targets 
  will look like with the format changes, and that staff time has 
  already been redirected to format testing. The RSOC agreed that the 
  SLA target is not stable enough at the moment to re-open the SLA 
  discussion.

  Robert Sparks suggested that some education about how the SLA works 
  might address some of the concerns. Heather Flanagan replied that she 
  will work on some educational material for the IAB, IESG, and Working 
  Group chairs.

5. BGPsec and Author Lists

  Heather Flanagan reported that there is a document currently in the 
  RFC Editor Queue where the Working Group created a new section of 
  about a dozen "Authors" that was distinct from "Authors Addresses" 
  section. The people listed in the "Authors" section were not listed in 
  the front matter; only two Editors were listed there.

  When the draft got to the RFC Editor, the RFC Editor renamed that 
  section to "Contributors" per the Style Guide, and started the AUTH48 
  process with just the editors listed on the front matter. Some of the 
  people listed as "Contributors" discovered this and were unhappy at 
  being downgraded from "Authors." This fed back to the IESG, who has  
  been working on a statement since the IESG retreat in May about 
  restricting number of authors and adding a new section for authors not 
  on the front matter. The IESG has not yet come to consensus on this 
  statement.

  Heather Flanagan has asked that they include those individuals that 
  feel they should be named as authors (which is not actually the full 
  list of people; some think they should be listed under Contributors) 
  on the front matter. It will be a long list, but follows the current 
  practice for how those are handled. This may result in the document 
  going back to the WG; that is still under discussion.

6. HTTPS for References

  Bob Hinden asked for an update on the status of using HTTPS in RFC 
  references. Heather Flanagan replied that additional changes to 
  references have been under discussion with the RPC. Heather said they 
  will likely make the changes for HTTPS soon and resolve the issues 
  around additional changes to the citation libraries later.

7. Large Data Sets in RFCs

  Robert Sparks noted that there are ongoing discussions about how to 
  handle artifacts that are not captured within an RFC (e.g. updates to 
  the Opus codec, which would require thousands of pages). Benoit Claise 
  and the YANG doctors are looking at ways to provide content that can 
  be referred to inside of RFCs that live outside the RFC documents. 
  Heather Flanagan noted that this issue of how to handle large datasets 
  has been an active conversation in the scholarly publishing world.