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 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.