Continuing the story - another stab at an IETF mission statement

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Apologies to those who are already tired of this debate, and those think 
that we have enough of a clear idea of what the IETF mission is, and that 
discussing more is harmful to the community, but....

I attempted to incorporate the latest discussions into an internet-draft, 
which I managed to get out just before the deadline....

  draft-alvestrand-ietf-mission-00.txt

The core of the draft:


  The goal of the IETF is to make the Internet work.

  The mission of the IETF is to produce high quality, relevant
  technical and engineering documents that influence the way people
  design, use and manage the Internet in such a way as to make the
  Internet work better.
  These documents include protocol standards, best current practices
  and informational documents of various kinds.

  The IETF will pursue this mission in adherence to the following
  cardinal principles:

  Open process - that any interested participant can in fact
     participate in the work, know what is being decided, and make his
     or her voice heard on the issue.  Part of this principle is our
     commitment to making our documents, our WG mailing lists, our
     attendance lists and our meeting minutes publicly available on the
     Net.

  Technical competence - that the issues on which the IETF produces its
     documents are issues where the IETF has the competence needed to
     speak to them, and that the IETF is willing to listen to
     technically competent input from any source.
     Technical competence also means that we expect IETF output to be
     designed to sound network engineering principles - this is also
     often referred to as "engineering quality".

  Volunteer Core - that our members and our leadership are people who
     come to the IETF because they want to work for the IETF's
     purposes.

  Rough consensus and running code - We make standards based on the
     combined engineering judgement of our participants and our real-
     world experience in implementing and deploying our specifications.


The rest of the document is trying to define the terms and explain the 
issues faced in formulating the mission statement.
An appendix (to be deleted before publication) lists some other attempts at 
formulating a mission statement - the purpose of including this is to give 
honor to those who worked on them, and to allow those who debate the issue 
to see what other attempts to formulate the mission could look like.

Comments are welcome, of course!

                     Harald