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Report from the 2026 RPC Retreat
- Sandy Ginoza Director of RPC Operations
- Jean Mahoney Director of RPC Communications and Strategy
18 May 2026
The RFC Production Center (RPC) retreat was a two-day strategic planning session taking place the week of April 20 that gathered the entire RPC team and IETF Administration senior staff.
The team reviewed the transformational projects identified during the 2025 RPC retreat and agreed that they are still relevant. The team acknowledged progress made and identified where further changes could be made. In the past year, the RPC successfully:
- updated the editorial process for efficiency gains, e.g., added an intake form where authors can answer some questions before editing of their document begins;
- implemented monthly public reporting on RPC activities to improve transparency; and
- rolled out pilot programs for editing in markdown and processing during AUTH48 in markdown and GitHub in response to community requests and tool usage.
For more details about the current status of transformational projects, refer to the monthly RPC reports (May 2026).
Much of the team’s focus was on the upcoming tools transition and related process changes. The upcoming tools will modernize the RPC processes and improve transparency regarding the status of documents awaiting publication. This change will completely overhaul the current editorial and publication practices. The team discussed the transition plan and ways to smooth the process, while also acknowledging the tension between mastering the new tools and processes and continuing to publish RFCs.
With these transformations and the upcoming changes to tools, the team expressed excitement about re-imagining the editorial process once the new tools are in place, with particular attention on AUTH48 initially, to ensure an efficient and simple editing process for authors and editors alike. The team is also exploring whether there are efficiency gains to be had by introducing AI into editorial process (e.g., can it help with formatting references and converting tables into RFCXML). With the increased visibility into the details of the editing flow, the team will be working to define a new service level agreement that considers community expectations and acknowledges the bursty nature of a project that has finite resources.
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