counter proposal on contributor/acknowledgement lists...

[Maryann Hondo <mhondo@us.ibm.com>]

I'd like to make a counter proposal.
While I agree that the editors should
be recognized for their contributions,
isn't the goal here to build a community
around a standard?
why not just simplify and follow what
wss did, which was to include all the others as "contributors".
the ietf generally had hundreds of participants
where this group is not so large that it would be prohibitive to include
everyone.

Maryann

"Philpott, Robert" <rphilpott@rsasecurity.com> 08/17/2004 09:35 AM

To:        <security-services@lists.oasis-open.org>         cc:                 Subject:        [security-services] proposal on contributor/acknowledgement lists...

I have a proposal on what to do with the
contributor/acknowledgement lists… it borrows a bit from the guidelines
for IETF RFC’s (see ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc-editor/instructions2authors.txt).
 
The “Editors” list should list those people
(and their affiliation) that authored MOST of the current document text
and physically edited the document drafts.  Roughly analogous to a
combining of the RFC “authors” list and the RFC editor, the list should
be quite short (e.g. 5 or fewer).
 
The “Contributors” list should list those
“who deserve significant credit for the [current] document contents”.
 I further propose that “significant credit” be roughly defined
as those that made material contribution to the spec; that is, they provided
some actual or proposed text (but not to the level of an editor), provided
significant editorial review comments, etc.  Note that the contribution
wouldn’t necessarily have to be written contribution (e.g. they may have
proposed some important changes during an official con-call meeting).  
 
In general, I think that anyone that personally
believes they fall in this contributors’ category should probably be listed
in this section.  But since I don’t think that someone should be
listed if they never really contributed to the list or in meetings, I recommend
that the co-chairs and spec editors should make the final call on these
marginal contributions. Note that this continues to be a bit subjective,
but having a group of arbiters should keep it “fair”.
 
I further propose that the “Acknowledgements”
section at the back of the spec be structured to include subsections listing:

• A subsection listing current voting members of the SSTC
• A subsection for all contributors to previous SAML releases that did not contribute to the current version
• A subsection for any other contributors (e.g. authors of input documents such as the Liberty specs).

We’ll discuss it on today’s call…

Rob Philpott
Senior Consulting Engineer
RSA Security Inc.
Tel: 781-515-7115
Mobile: 617-510-0893
Fax: 781-515-7020
mailto:rphilpott@rsasecurity.com