On 14 Oct 2022, at 0:05, Toerless Eckert wrote:
Inline
On Thu, Oct 13, 2022 at 04:58:58PM -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
…
I miss the days when IETF was often capable of having constructive
technical discussions, even when some participants' frustration was
evident, without the need for moderators or Tone Police.That was in the past because it was a smaller community, but if we plan
to expand we should change for best practices.As far as I can tell, active participation in IETF was substantially smaller
in the last few pre-COVID years than it was in the late 1990s. But I'm
judging more from face to face meeting attendance figures than anything
else.+1 Key word here is "active" i think. Stable if not growing observer participation.
The number of people actively sending email to IETF lists peaked in around 2007, and has slowly declined since then. The number of messages sent was increasing until around 2010, and has been broadly stable since.
This is using the messages archived on the IETF IMAP server, so doesn’t include WG lists hosted by third parties. That was more common in the past than today, so will skew the very early data.
I suspect one difference between "those days" and today is that IETF in the
past had proportionally more representation from academics and less from
employees of corporations, than we have today. IETF has effectively
filtered out a lot of non-corporate people (whether deliberately or
accidentally) with its high cost of in-person participation.Don't think in-person is the main issue.
Long time to produce RFC is IMHO big reason
Funding for topics relating to what can be done in IETF is also core reasonAka: it is uncommon, but stsill well possible IMHO to participate as an
acedemic through email/conference-calls and produce RFC. You just need funding
and some IETF WG/team that works fast enough for an acaemics requirements.
The fraction of attendees coming from academia has actually increased over time, at least by some metrics. Looking at the breakdown of draft authors, it increased from 8% of authors being from academica in 2001 to around 14% in 2020, having peaked at 17% in 2009.
Both plots from https://sodestream.github.io/paper-characterising-the-ietf-through-the-lens-of-rfc-deployment.html
Colin
--
Colin Perkins
https://csperkins.org/
