RFC SERIES OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE (RSOC) November 16, 2017 RSOC Meeting Reported by: Cindy Morgan, IETF Secretariat ATTENDEES --------------------------------- Sarah Banks (Chair) Nevil Brownlee Heather Flanagan (RSE, non-voting) Joel Halpern Bob Hinden Cindy Morgan (Scribe, non-voting) Adam Roach Martin Thomson Portia Wenze-Danley (IAOC Liaison, non-voting) REGRETS --------------------------------- Tony Hansen Robert Sparks (Lead) GUESTS --------------------------------- Sandy Ginoza Allison Mankin MINUTES --------------------------------- 1. Administrivia 1.1. Approval of Minutes The minutes of the 11 September 2017 RSOC Meeting were approved. 1.2. Call scheduling December through April The RSOC was unable to agree on a recurring time for teleconferences between December and April. The RSOC agreed to meet at 4:00 PM PST on Tuesday, 5 December 2017, and revisit the schedule for future calls at the beginning of 2018. 2. Agenda bash No new items were added to the agenda. 3. SLA check in Heather Flanagan reported that the SLA has been consistently met in 2017. She noted that the RFC Production Center has been warned that there a number of Area Directors retiring in March, so they should expect a surge in documents between now and then. Adam Roach added that Cluster 238 is also about to be released, which will add an additional surge of documents. 3.1. RFC Costs The RSOC discussed RFC costs. Bob Hinden noted that the cost per RFC has been increasing over time. The cost per page and cost per RFC trends track consistently. Since 2013, the total RFC Editor costs have risen independently of the number of RFCs published; this can be attributed to bring on a new RFC Series Editor, as well as projects including: - New RFC Format - Tool improvements (new search, RSS feeds, updated the publication process page, updating author pages, updated reporting pages) - New RFC Style Guide - ESL lab experiment and "EFL Writing Resources" - Google Scholar-related changes - Research on digital signatures - DOIs - Statistics and metrics project - New RFC Editor Website - Internal training on format changes - Format tools testing 4. Format Update Heather Flanagan reported that the RFP for one of the new RFC format tools has gone back out to bid, which will have some implications on the overall timeline for the new RFC format project. 5. Content Discovery services Heather Flanagan asked if there is a better way to help people find relevant RFCs, such as offering links to related documents. She noted that RFCs already have keywords, but they would need to be cleaned up significantly. Heather is planning to raise this issue with the IESG during their 2018 retreat. 6. YANG Modules and Data sets Heather Flanagan noted that YANG modules and data sets are strongly associated with RFCS, but not RFCs themselves. They need curation (metadata for discovery and interoperability; archiving), and have a different approval process than RFCs. Examples of data repositories include: - DRYAD (Dryad Digital Repository) – https://datadryad.org - CAIDA (Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis) - https://www.caida.org/ The YANG module stats have hundreds of small files. MAPRG and NWCRG will both have data sets, but are not expecting to publish drafts or RFCs any time soon. Heather Flanagan added that there is still more research to do in this area to figure out what would be tractable for the RFC Editor. 7. IRTF open access journal possibilities The IRTF Chair looking to build an academic journal for the IRTF. RFCs, as they relate to IETF work, would still be published. This is also being discussed directly in the IAB; there will be lots of work involved, and there are still many open questions. Allison Mankin has been working with Stephen Farrell to put together a proposal for this. Allison is interested in the RPC publishing the journal as a parallel track. The current idea is to pilot the program by publishing the ANRP papers in a journal, and then extending it from there. Heather Flanagan replied that a journal would need some graphic design that the RFC Series does not use, and the set of tools needed would be very different from the set currently used by the RPC. The cost for the journal would potentially be very high. Joel Halpern asked if ISOC had indicated whether they would pay for this, since money for the journal could not be taken from the current RFC Editor budget. Allison Mankin replied that they would have to do the pilot journal without a budget and see what happens from there. Discussions are still ongoing. 8. AOB: Editor Time Sandy Ginoza asked if the RFC Production Center still has approval to bring on another part-time editor given that the new format tools are not yet ready for testing. She noted that an additional part-time editor would still be helpful, given the expected surge in documents with the number of Area Directors retiring in March and the release of Cluster 238. Heather Flanagan said that she would raise the issues with the stream managers.