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 

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