Hi Keith,
At 02:19 AM 01-10-2023, Keith Moore wrote:
It wasn't really about trade-offs so much as about overall direction
and goals of IETF. (If any organization is headed in the wrong
direction, doing so more efficiently can actually be
counterproductive. So it's important to get the direction right, or
at least close to right, above all else.)
I'll have to give some thought to "direction" in order to comment about it.
When I was an Applications AD it was a 100% time commitment, which
is to say, I generally spent about 60 hours per week on it. And
yes, it was impractical in multiple ways, and I had trouble keeping
up with all the WGs and the documents they produced. After four
years of doing that I was certainly burned out. But those years
(1996-2000) were kind of an exceptional time as the Internet was
seeing a tremendous amount of new interest, and I believe the period
of greatest in-person participation in IETF.
The feedback after 2000 was that it was a bit more than a full-time
job. In addition, any interested party would have to fulfill an
ability to travel requirement.
It's easy to be burnt out because of IETF workload. It is possible
to manage the time to something workable.
To me the huge workload in Applications said that the Applications
area needed to focus on the applications protocols that were most
needed by the Internet community, rather than merely balance
workload between ADs. (And I think IESG was better balanced then
than it is now.) I recognized then that IETF could not practically
expand to cover all of the Applications-related topics that needed
standardization. And unfortunately (at least IMO) a lot of
applications became vendor-specific web applications rather than
applications based on standard protocols. (Not saying that HTTP
wasn't a standard, but rather that HTTP framing wasn't a good fit
for many kinds of applications, and also that HTTP alone wasn't
sufficient to encourage interoperability between different
implementations of the same application. Of course, many vendors
prefer walled gardens, but IMO walled gardens do not serve the
Internet user community well.).
I agree that walled gardens are not ideal. In my opinion, it's
better to be realistic about them.
Applications is inherently a broad topic, so I don't think the mix
of several subjects was due to historical reasons. We used to talk
about "the hourglass" which was wide at the bottom (lots of
different kinds of transmission media), narrow at the waist
(TCP,UDP,IP), and wide at the top (wide variety of
applications). We couldn't have adequately covered the entire
Applications Area with 5 APPS ADs, and trying to do that would have
strained IETF's ability to scale in many other ways.
I doubt that having five managers per area would be manageable.
I don't know where they're kept, but it's pretty common to cite
metrics like number of RFCs published in a certain period, or
average number of days of delay between certain milestones in
documents' development. And those statistics are useful. But
it's even more useful to have a sense of whether IETF is producing
what the Internet community needs, it's just not as easy to measure that.
There was one or more initiatives about implementation/deployment of
the standards produced by the IETF.
Regards,
S. Moonesamy
