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Alexis Rossi appointed as RFC Series Consulting Editor
1 Sep 2022
Alexis Rossi has been appointed as the RFC Series Consulting Editor (RSCE). As RSCE, she will provide expert advice on the processes and policies for the RFC Series, which is made up of documents from the Internet’s principal technical development and standards-setting bodies.
The RSCE role was established as part of a new RFC Editor Model intended to provide greater transparency, improved responsiveness to the needs of the community, and increased clarity regarding the roles and responsibilities of the groups and individuals involved, while ensuring the RFC Series remains the premier venue for publishing technical standards specifying the protocols that undergird the Internet.
Alexis assumes the RSCE role while continuing in her position as the Director of Media & Access at the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library dedicated to collecting all the world’s knowledge and making it available to everyone for free.
As the RFC Series Consulting Editor, she will provide guidance on a range of issues related to the RFC Series, drawing on experience and expertise gained at the Internet Archive and in her previous work, including as an editor of an online news site and of books.
Alexis was selected by a committee of community members with diverse perspectives, and in consultation with representatives of the four publication streams that make up the RFC Series.
Peter Saint-Andre, a member of the RSCE recruitment committee and editor of RFC 9280 which documents the current RFC Editor Model, said. "Alexis is an excellent fit for the new RSCE role. Among other things, her significant experience with information archiving will enable her to advance the RFC Series as the pre-eminent archival series for Internet protocols. The RSCE recruitment committee was extremely pleased to find such a great candidate”
Michael StJohns, another member of the RSCE recruitment committee, said, "I'm ecstatic to welcome Alexis to the IETF community. She brings a wealth of experience that will translate well to the RFC Series. Her broad background working with technical communities will be extremely valuable for ensuring the publication process continues to serve RFC authors and readers alike."
As RSCE, Alexis will work closely with the RFC Series Working Group (RSWG) and the RFC Production Center (RPC), and will serve on the RFC Series Approval Board (RSAB). Going forward, she expects to participate in-person at IETF meetings, including in London at the upcoming IETF 115 meeting on 5-11 November 2022.
Asked about her new role as RSCE, Alexis said, “Over my 26 years in the Internet industry, I have watched the Internet grow from an esoteric corner of society into our main source of communication and information. And all of that was made possible by people agreeing to work together to create and follow the practices described in RFCs. I’m excited to contribute to the production and preservation of these critical documents that we all rely on.”
In her role at the Internet Archive, Alexis manages more than 80 million items in their digital collections including text, audio, video, images, and software. Some of her current projects include radio, television and podcast archiving, and large scale metadata improvement and linking. Before that, Alexis managed the redesign and implementation of the archive.org interface, which serves more than 1.6 million users per day. She ran the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and established the current mass web crawling infrastructure. She also co-founded and launched OpenLibrary.org, a web site which aims to have one web page for every book ever published.