> > Taking a step back for a moment, see why are we interested in measuring > something? You measure to see how effective you are at reaching your > goals. So what are the goals of any IETF activity? Presumably it's *not* > to produce RFCs, or to exchange ideas, or even to consume pastry. I > respectfully submit for your flaying and filleting that the core goal of > the IETF is to promote interactive communications through the > development of open protocols. It's an interesting question. RFC 3160 says (about the IETF): > Its mission includes: > > - Identifying, and proposing solutions to, pressing > operational and technical problems in the Internet; > > - Specifying the development or usage of protocols and the > near-term architecture to solve such technical problems for > the Internet; > > - Making recommendations to the Internet Engineering Steering > Group (IESG) regarding the standardization of protocols and > protocol usage in the Internet; > > - Facilitating technology transfer from the Internet Research > Task Force (IRTF) to the wider Internet community; and > > - Providing a forum for the exchange of information within the > Internet community between vendors, users, researchers, > agency contractors, and network managers. If the goal of the IETF is to do good protocol design, than one metric of whether we are doing our job correctly is by how frequently our protocols fail or have "unintended interactions." Since we can't legislate the use of IETF protocols on the Internet, we must sometimes rely on our track record of doing things right to motivate people to choose an IETF standard over doing their own thing. If we turn out junk, we'll loose that "moral authority." I'm not saying that things shouldn't break on the Internet. But the things that break should be IETF protocols interfering with each other. --aaron