[rfc-i] Some questions about the RFC Editor restructuring plan

[Paul Hoffman]

At 3:29 PM -0700 8/8/08, Sandy Ginoza wrote:
>While it is true that the IAOC manages the contracts of the copy
>editors, the RFC Editor (currently) manages the workload and training
>efforts (with the ability to escalate problems to the IAD).

That is how it should be. The person responsible for the copy editing 
should be doing both training and review of the copy editors.

>Please note that there is a notable difference between the work of
>the copy editor and the primary editor that works with the document/
>authors until publication.

This, too, is how it should be.

>Please remember the initial sense of anger expressed by the
>community when the copy editors were introduced because the RFC
>Editor was "over editing".

This may have been due to too little training of the copy editors 
and/or too little oversight of them.

>We currently have 3 active copy editors working with the RFC Editor.
>Each of them has varying levels of IETF- and RFC-specific knowledge,
>and each of them returns a different level of copy-edited product.

This does not sound like a good situation. Shouldn't there be a small 
bit of training to bring them all up to the correct speed? Most 
professional copy editors can learn these types of things in a small 
number of hours, approximately the time it would take to copy edit 
maybe two RFCs.

The take-away here is that, in the proposed structure, the Production 
House is responsible for the copy editing *and* for making sure the 
copy editing is done well (as well as other tasks, of course).

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium