IESG Statement on Addressing Comments and Crediting Contributions
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Ensuring broad review and input into IETF internet-drafts leads to higher quality technical specifications. The IESG recognizes that knowing how to provide input can be a barrier. It is crucial to provide appropriate credit to participants, encouraging them to expend effort on input and review of documents. For these reasons, the IESG reiterates and emphasizes below the processes for handling contributions and providing appropriate credit for this input.

Handling Community Input

Community review and addressing community input is the foundation of the IETF standards process. The standards process, as defined in RFC2026, is designed to ensure there is “ample opportunity for participation and comment by all interested parties. At each stage of the standardization process, a specification is repeatedly discussed and its merits debated.” As a matter of implementation, Section 3.3 of RFC2418 reminds us that “working groups make decisions through a ‘rough consensus’ process.” Practically, as explained in RFC7282, “rough consensus is achieved when all issues are addressed, but not necessarily accommodated.”

With consensus, Working Groups may adopt practices to govern the tracking of issues and comments provided by the community. For example, using a particular convention on a mailing list, reviews during meetings or using an issue tracker linked to a version control repository (e.g., GitHub). Regardless of the tools and processes used, including issue trackers, the mailing list(s) discussion is the single source of truth for determining if all comments have been considered.

As comments and issues are discussed, “it is a responsibility of the Working Group Chairs to ensure that document authors make modifications in accord with working group rough consensus” (RFC7221). Another confirmation that all known issues raised in the WG were addressed is again verified by the document shepherd. Finally, the IESG is responsible for ensuring that all issues raised during the IETF Last Call are addressed.

Document Credit and Attribution

Related to the handling of community input is how this input is credited in the technical specifications of the WG. The RFC Editor and the RFC Style Guide describe three ways in which credit is given for a contribution in a document.

• Authors provided “active technical contribution to the text either by personally writing a substantial part of it or by detailed and close technical collaboration with the person(s) doing so.” See RFC Series Editor statement on authorship

• Contributors “made significant contributions to the document”. See Section 4.11 of RFC7322.

• Acknowledgement is “used by authors to publicly thank those who have provided feedback regarding a document”. See Section 4.10 of RFC7322.

From most to least significant degree of contribution to the content of the document is an author, contributor, and someone mentioned in the acknowledgement section.

The IESG encourages document authors to use the acknowledgement section and contributors sections of the document to recognize substantial contributions and feedback on the document. If technical changes, or substantial editorial changes, to the text of the document were made as a result of any provided community input, strong consideration should be made for providing credit.

The IESG also reminds authors to avoid the problematic practice of surprise authors.
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