On 4/15/21 10:45 AM, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
If many IETF'ers do standards work out of a passion to make the world a better place, and continue their work across multiple employers (which is very similar to many open source engineers)...
In asking myself why it's hard to attract new people to IETF, I find myself wondering if it's harder these days for newcomers to see how they can "make the world a better place" by working with IETF, than it used to be.
I don't want to dismiss those who claim the problem is "culture", but IETF culture exists for some reasons (some but maybe not all of them good ones), and I think there might be other factors also.
The "low hanging fruit" is mostly picked. If you want to make a
positive difference for the world/Internet it's harder to do these
days than it used to be. The existing protocols are more complex
and often more entrenched, making them harder to understand and
harder to change. The network is more hostile to innovation.
There's a lot of inertia within IETF itself also, both in the
sense of accumulated wisdom and accumulated prejudice about which
ideas are "good" vs. "bad" (even if conditions have changed making
old assumptions less valid). The IETF organization itself is a
lot more complex and bureaucratic than it used to be. And a lot
of the Internet is effectively controlled by a small number of
large companies, so any innovation that wants to be successful has
to be made in awareness of the economic landscape as well as the
technical and political and cultural.
And yet, there are still opportunities to make valuable
contributions, and in some sense to make even more valuable
contributions than could be made in the past. Because the growth
of the Internet has made some problems larger and more important
than ever.
But a newcomer faces a steep learning curve consisting of many
different layers of complexity AND a unique culture: they have to
know a LOT (technically and politically and economically and
culturally) to make a useful difference. (I suspect IETF culture
is actually the least of these barriers - experienced IETF people
still want to find and encourage new people who actually show
interest and have a chance at making a useful difference)
So if I'm right, part of attracting newcomers means showing them
how to navigate these layers. And I believe there are things we
could do to help educate newcomers (as well as some who are
experienced but perhaps aren't quite up to date). Take
addressing and routing for example. There's a lot of accumulated
wisdom about how to delegate addresses to make routing a more
manageable problem in both hardware and software, about fairness
in address block assignment, about routing policies, about route
advertisements and aggregation, etc. There are different types
of addresses for each of IPv4 and IPv6 and a need to understand
these. There's a need to know about NATs, the different kinds
of NATs, what's good and (mostly) bad about them. There is also a
need to know about the roles of IANA and the regional registries
and some degree of current practice between RRs and operators, and
routing arrangements between operators.
Somewhere there needs to be a resource that points IETFers who are interested in routing and addressing, or anything that touches them or relies on them, to some current information about those topics, with pointers to even more detail. And that resource should probably also point out currently-unsolved important problems, just to get people interested (maybe kind of like the exercises in Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming books). If good resources like this already exist, great; if not, someone needs to be recruited to write them. And similar resources are needed for several other layers or widely-used technologies: "the web", email, transport protocols, DNS, etc.
Keith
