On 10/1/23 10:09, S Moonesamy wrote:
Hi Keith,
At 02:19 AM 01-10-2023, Keith Moore wrote:
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.
Some ADs might have had a bit less workload, but I think everyone had a
lot of work. And the travel requirement is still a problem. Few
employers and few individuals have the money or time to spare to pay for
activities that don't produce revenue. And that unfortunately means
that almost everyone on IESG works for a large corporation, and the
organization as a whole pays too much attention to corporate interests
at the expense of the broader Internet community.
It's easy to be burnt out because of IETF workload. It is possible to
manage the time to something workable.
It's always possible to work less. I don't think it's been
demonstrated that it's possible to do a good job as an AD (in most
areas) by working significantly less.
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.
In all things, it's better to be realistic, to be willing to recognize
reality. (However just because something is labeled as "reality"
doesn't mean it's true.)
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.
It wasn't even manageable to have five ADs in one area. But we
shouldn't assume that all areas have the same workload.
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.
Deployment shouldn't be taken as a proxy for utility.
Keith
