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Conversation between Nicole Harris & Licia Florio, co-chairs of REFEDs, and Heather Flanagan, RSE

On 02/07/2012 22:21, Heather Flanagan (RFC Series Editor) wrote:

Hi Licia, Nicole -

I'm the IAOC for budget), and
the different components within the RFC Editor.

The Series was structured this way specifically to allow us to accept
new streams if and when requested and appropriate. That said, there is
nothing currently documented regarding how a new stream is introduced in
to the Series queue. Let's break some ground!

So, with that background, I have a few questions to get us started:

1 - Why the RFC Series and not Kantara or OASIS or another umbrella
organization? What are you hoping to achieve by publishing RFC and not
documents on your wiki as you do today?

Consistency, structure, clarity are the main points. I don't think Kantara has an evolved enough 'process' for this as yet, and OASIS is too unwieldy. The RFC process better matches the openness of the REFEDS group and our general working approach (which is still evolving itself). As we want to get things in to a format where we are pushing towards clear recommendations if we don't use something like the RFC, we will only have to invent something ourselves and why reinvent the wheel?

I think we will continue to have a hybrid approach and there will be outputs that are different (e.g. the Discovery Project) but Leif has already demonstrated the RFC approach for several minor areas (entity categories etc.) and I think we can build on this well.

The biggest concern I have at the moment is upskilling the REFEDS people in writing RFCs, but I think that's a nut we can crack


2 - REFEDs has a limited mandate and is at a point of change in the
organization. Do you anticipate REFEDs being a persistent entity for
the next 5-10 years?

I can only see REFEDS growing at the moment. We've just been busy hawking REFEDS to the EC as the equivalent of IGTF in the federation space.


3 - The RFC Series has some particular points of style and format that
must be consistent across the streams. Today that means ASCII only,
fixed line and page lengths, and a fairly common document structure
(Abstract, Introduction, Headers, Footers, etc.) Is REFEDs willing to
accept those constraints and participate in the discussions regarding
potential changes to those constraints? Do you have any format
requirements of your own, such as a UTF-8 character set or inclusion of
graphics or HTML-style links?

Personally, I don't think so. I'd rather keep the purity of the RFC structure as supporting material can always be held elsewhere - we can always have pretty flyers and more PR friendly work on the wiki and the website. I can't think of anything specific we might have that would mean we would have to have a specific requirement.

refeds.txt · Last modified: 2012/08/27 11:28 by rsewikiadmin