A new IETF working group has been proposed in the General Area. The IESG has not made any determination as yet. The following description was submitted, and is provided for informational purposes only. Please send your comments to the IESG mailing list (iesg@ietf.org) by February 18th. New IETF Standards Track (newtrk) --------------------------------- Current Status: Proposed Working Group Description of Working Group: The problem working group found that many IETF participants feel that the current IETF hierarchy of Proposed, Draft and Full Standard maturity levels for specifications is no longer being used in the way that was envisioned when the stratification was originally proposed. In practice, the IETF currently has a one-step standards process. The goal of this working group is to agree on a revised IETF Standards Track, to replace the standards track described in RFC 2026. The working group will also decide on a process path forward. The disparity between the documented IETF standards process and what is used in practice can cause confusion on the part of those people or organizations that use IETF technologies. It has also led to a general disregard of the cautions in RFC 2026 on the appropriate deployment of IETF technologies described in Internet Drafts or Proposed Standard RFCs. The NewTrk working group is a follow on to the newtrk BOF held during the 58th IETF Meeting in Minneapolis. That BOF was held as a result of the work of the problem working group. The sense of the room at the end of the newtrk BOF was that: 1/ some change was needed to the IETF Standards Track 2/ a revised standards track should have more than one stage 3/ there should be some form of "working group snapshot," this might or might not be a formal stage on the standards track and might or might not be an archival publication 4/ at least one stage should require multiple interoperable implementations of the technology to ensure document clarity 5/ any revised standards track should include some type of "IPR hook" to keep the IETF and IESG out of the business of determining what IPR claims are legitimate and what licensing terms are fair. The goal of this working group is to agree on a revised IETF Standards Track, taking into consideration the above points, to replace the standards track described in RFC 2026. The working group will also decide on a process for making forward progress. Some of the possible paths being producing a revised version of RFC 2026 (and maybe other RFCs), producing a standalone document or documents that update parts of the existing RFCs or a mixture of the two. There may be other possibilities. The working group should also take into account other issues raised by the problem working group and during the newtrk BOF as needed. The deliberations of the working group will cover at least the following topics: a/ the standards track itself (number of stages, movement between maturity levels, working group snapshots, maintenance, IPR issues) b/ access to the standards track for individual submissions c/ non-standards track document categories including BCP, Informational, Experimental, and Historic and their relationship to the standards track d/ usability of the standards track (bug fixes, version numbers, grouping multiple specifications, and maybe deprecation) The NewTrk working group will coordinate its work with other reform activities currently underway in the IETF.
