I think it's on track, as a description of the "common interest" (a phrase someone used earlier).
I'm still itching for something that acts as a delimeter -- how do we know whether we, collectively, should be working on X or ignoring Y? How can we know when we are "succeeding" at our mission?
Harald outlined some possibilities in terms of the scope of the work, and people didn't seem to resonate with that approach.
Is our mission to collectively work on some selection of things of common interest? Do we have common view on means of determining relevance in "relevant services in transit and edge networks"? Are we obligated, by this statement of interest, to work on anything someone (or a large enough collection of "someones") considers relevant at a given point in time?
Someone earlier raised the point that the description of the space in which we work (the IETF's scope) may not be the description of the work that we collectively take on -- I guess I'm wondering whether we can characterize the subset in some constructive way, so that it will be clearer to us, and to communities trying to work with us, what we should/will put energy into at a given point in time.
Leslie.
Fred Baker wrote:
Let me try to say all that succinctly:
"The Internet Engineering Task Force provides a forum for the discussion and development of white papers and specifications for the engineering issues of the Internet. This discussion builds on hard lessons learned in research and operational environments, and necessarily includes speakers from those communities. Vendors offer wisdom on what can be built and made to work in their products, and may bring customer or market issues whose owners cannot or will not bring themselves.
The intended goal is well characterized as 'community memory' - written observations and wisdom as well as protocols and operational procedures defined - to enable the datagram internet to scalably deliver relevant services in transit and edge networks."
Is that on target? Is it too many words?