Il 06/01/2021 00:31 Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> ha scritto:But together it appears MUCH more difficult to participate in IETF now than ever in its history. And while I want to acknowledge the hard work that many have put in for decades to lower these barriers (I remember when there were NO remote participation options though occasionally there would be a speaker in a WG meeting via a very expensive international cell phone call); to me that seems like despite all that work, and despite all of the amazing advances in technology, the situation has still worsened considerably.
As a side note on this point, I suspect that today's general difficulty in participating meaningfully in the creation and standardization of new Internet technology is mostly not due to the change in discussion instruments, but to the extreme specialization of today's Internet engineering tasks, as a consequence of its own technical development and of its massive growth.
When I got my first Internet access as a student in the mid 90's, you could very easily learn some simple tools and languages and start building your own stuff - and that was the Internet's magic. Just a few weeks after getting connected, I was already able to put up my first personal website. For a while, you could build and deploy a state-of-the-art website just by installing a single application (Apache 1.0) and learning a single spec (RFC 1866). Today it takes at least half a dozen of different job descriptions relying on hundreds of specifications to build one, unless you want to rely on pre-cooked stuff - so you do that. Almost all engineers just use tools, applications and libraries that other people implemented, and never come in touch with the actual standards except for, maybe, a tiny subset of them.
So, of course today the discussions on IETF WG mailing lists are often impossible to understand even for people that are considered to be expert engineers on that topic. But that's not a tooling issue.
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Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
vittorio.bertola@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy
