[rfc-i] Role of the Editorial Board

[Paul Hoffman]

At 1:30 PM -0400 9/23/08, Craig Partridge wrote:
>Or... putting the point more firmly.  Why "fix" something that's working?

Because we don't have evidence that it is working as well as two 
different boards, each with appropriate subject experts.

My experience with editorial boards seems quite different than yours. 
Technical book publishers rarely have overlap between the group that 
helps decide which proposed books are worthy to be published and the 
group that decides what the format for books should be or how to make 
the document processing better. I have participated in both types of 
groups for publishers back in the days before the Internet made a lot 
of dead-tree publishing of technical books moot. The type of people 
in the two groups had very different skill sets.

Clearly, the board that helps review independent submissions is quite 
useful both to the series editor and to the community. However, if 
there really isn't a need for an advisory board to help the RFC 
Editor think about improving the RFC series and its processing, then 
that board can be disbanded. The latter seems unlikely, however; the 
IETF has a fair number of people who have first-hand experience with 
publishing systems who could help guide the series forwards.

We should try to optimize for the skills available in the IETF, not 
to minimize numbers of groups just because that's how we have done it 
in the past.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium