Umm, having worked for a different standards organization (the OSF and The Open Group) and being somewhat familiar with their current operations, now, I can say the following: Back when I worked at OSF, it had about 325 employees and some additional number of sabbaticals and contractors not counted as employees, spread across 3 continents. Of course, it actually implemented or integrated quite a bit of code, or specified and supervised the work done at other companies, as well as evaluated a ton-load more code from other companies. Having had a key to the technoloy submission room, I can attest to the vastness of these submissions. That was then. Later I was a consultant to The Open Group as it merged the activities of X/Open and the X Consortium and downsized to its current form. The current operations are much, much leaner. But they do not generally develop code any more, except in the Research group, which is also much, much smaller. Unlike the IETF, The Open Group is involved in the administration of technology licencing and collection of royalties and all that is involved with that. There are probably other differences that I am not aware of. One may be fond of the phrase 'order of magnitude smaller', but I don't think it bears close scrutiny. I don't want to say that these 9.33 people in the secretariate aren't doing their job, or that they aren't necessary. I don't have sufficient information to judge that. That is really the task of the executive director. But how they are organized, what their work is, and what, if anything, can be automated, does seem to be a reasonable question. Platitudes are not sufficient. However, I would repeat a previous criticism of the IETF operations as being sloppy on the administration of its process, particularly in regard to the execution of the IETF process rules regarding when and how standards proposals are to be moved through the process or dropped. There could be many reasons for this particular failure. It could be the IETF is understaffed, it could be the IETF is simply poorly organized, or it could be something else. But it is in our mutual interest to find out, and correct the problem. --Dean On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, Steven M. Bellovin wrote: > >Maybe this would be a good time to explain what the IETF needs a 9.33 > >person secretariat for, and why the secretariat must be entirely funded > >by meeting fees. > > Y'know, IETFers always have fun comparing the size of our secretariat > to those from other standards organizations. The phrase "order of > magnitude smaller" comes to mind. > > The Secretariat handles I-D processing, meeting planning, IESG > telechats, software development and systems administration to support all > that, and much, much more. > > > >As for the network: Vienna has shown that it's possible to do better. > > There were at least two major external items that were different this > time: nasty, aggressive worms, both inside and outside -- *why* should > anyone clueful enough to attend an IETF meeting not know how to run AV > software, at the very least! -- and "helpful" operating systems that > think that going into IBSS mode when they don't hear a base station is > "user-friendly". > > --Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb > > > >