this exchange is the first, where the real issue which interests me (user-centric approach) is discussed: the deliverables as such. "I am in agreement with all what you say here. Just pointing out that even with specialization, we may have quite a lot to do." says Jari to Keith, amen.
Jari says they should be the best the user expects, and Keith the best we can. I can certainly live with both approaches. But for years I bore everyone in the IETF to obtain that kind of debate: I learn that due to the very nature of the RFC system, IETF is not interested in delivering and maintaining a technology (keeping a structured and updated consistent "how to develop/use documentation" - comprehensive for Jari, of high level for Keith), but in publishing Internet documents of interest to its members. I mesure that in particular through the lack of interest into a Multilingual Internet, however important and exciting are the architectural extensions it calls for, with falls back in every Internet areas.
So, I have two questions:
1. do you think that a third party effort extracting an "IETF Internet Technology" (Jari) or an "IETF and Others Internet Technology" (Keith) book and maintaining it would be of help? Do you think that after a probable sunrise despising period, RFC authors would contribute in proposing additions and updates corresponding to the RFCs they publish?
2. I see the IETF as a pool of authors, the IESG as a publisher and IAB as its technical adviser, managing a document collection. Some people are interested in authoring documents for various reasons (business, self-recognition, political, pet subject, etc.. The IESG makes them reviewed by peers before reviewing their text themselves (this process is not perfect, but is normal). I feel the recognition and exposure expected by the authors and the resulting seriousness filter and synthesis of the public comments is not important enough to fully play their role. This is why everyone is a little or much dismayed, depending on their personal interests and experience.
And this is why I think press recognition, exposure, synthesis, critics and feed-backs are necessary. I accept that other standardization entities may not have press coverage, but they usually have another source of external recognition, exposure, synthesis, critics and feed-back through public / international bodies and financing, Internet has not (cf. RFC 3869 analysis). This is why I keep referring to "Nature" which addresses the same problem for general Research.
Question: is this evaluation correct? Should it not be a negotiation of the IASA with a publisher to barter a part of the IETF publication rights against press coverage and a possible technology synthesis? Or would such a third party initiative help? It could start with an official personal maintained bio+vision+activity report of all those interested in normalizing the Internet. F2F pay-meetings are otherwise a way to make the IETF an internuts veterans business sponsored association.
I would be interested in statistics on IETF Membership: how many are attending meetings on personal expenses? how many per country? how many per class of age? for how long have them been a member? This kind of information would help better understanding this debate, to know who is excited by belonging to a group of experts and who is excited by the quality of the resulting common deliverables.
jfc
At 14:21 29/04/2005, Keith Moore wrote:
Keith, you have been advocating a model where the IETF would be stricter in allowing what work be taken up, in order to ensure that we can actually deliver. But I share the same opinion as John L that we should rather try to shape the IETF so that it can deliver what the world needs.
My primary criterion when arguing whether IETF should or should not take up a WG was always, in some sense, whether the Internet needed IETF to be involved in and supporting this effort. It involved both an assessment of how much harm would result from a botched design (in particular, a design that didn't respect the Internet environment and other protocols on the net), and of whether IETF could expend the resources necessary to manage the group and whether it could bring the necessary expertise to the table. It also involved an assessment of whether the proposed protocol would actually be of benefit to the Internet long-term. What I didn't try to assess (much) was whether IETF's reputation would be enhanced by its involvement in that particular WG.
Part of the reason why I believe so is that despite its problems, I think the IETF produces the best technology and highest quality. I want to use IETF multimedia, IETF network access control mechanisms, IETF security and not something else. This won't be easy of course, but I think we can do it. We are extremely good engineers and we've been able to produce scalable technology and useful, complexity reducing abstractions. Maybe time to apply some of that for our organization as well?
I don't think that IETF inherently produces the best technology and highest quality in every area of Internet protocol design. We cannot be good at everything. I may be dated in my awareness of our participants' expertise, but I doubt we have enough of the best designers of cryptographic algorithms, audio or video codecs, forward error correction codes, radio transmission methods, etc. There's a reason we leave valuable technical work to IEEE, 3GPP, W3C, etc. We have to specialize, as they do. The Internet is too vast and diverse for all of its technical work to be done by one organization. For me the selection criteria (in brief) have to do with whether the protocols in question impact the core Internet protocols or protocols traditionally developed in IETF, or whether the protocols in question need input from those with the most expertise from core or traditional IETF protocols. Those are fairly elastic criteria that cover a lot of ground, but not everything. For instance, we don't need to be involved much in B2B transaction processing as long as those guys can use existing protocols like TCP or HTTP in a way that works well for them and doesn't adversely impact the Internet. We might say things like "don't run everything over port 80" or "don't place too much faith in perimeter security" but we don't need to try to take over all of their protocol design.
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