I believe if the community does not have confidence that the protocol will actually work on the Internet, then we are experimenting. I think this definition would cover a number of protocols we would now consider for Proposed Standard (rather than Informational), and pushes us back towards "Running Code". A protocol that has no implementations and is significantly new and different that we cannot inspect the document to have confidence it will work as intended would be Experimental. This is both a complexity and an exposition test as well as a measure of how similar a protocol is to other protocols we know work as intended. I think that when an author, or an entire work group, dreams up a significant new protocol and brings forth a complex document with no code, then we have a research and development effort underway, which should be allowed to complete; that is, test it. We have a product (a real standard), when we show that our research worked. As with most research and experimentation, it is not necessary to have market acceptance to have a successful research project. It is nice, and a good indicator that the protocol works. Brian -----Original Message----- From: ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx [mailto:ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Brian E Carpenter Sent: Wednesday, February 15, 2006 10:07 AM To: IETF discussion list Subject: What's an experiment? When considering some recent appeals, the IESG discovered that we have very little guidance about the meaning of "experiments" in relation to Experimental RFCs. RFC 2026 refers to work which is "part of some research or development effort" and the IESG has adopted some guidelines to discriminate between Experimental and Informational documents (see http://www.ietf.org/u/ietfchair/draft-iesg-info-exp-01.html ). But beyond that, we do not know what constitutes an acceptable experiment on the Internet. The IESG notes that the community could establish a variety of guidelines describing what is and is not acceptable in experiments. Historically, the IESG has made decisions based on its perception that there is a strong desire in the community to publish technology that is being deployed experimentally. We encourage community discussion and development of more specific guidelines on operational conflicts caused by experiments and how this should affect what we choose to publish. (However we recommend that such discussion focus on the general issue rather than the specifics of any case.) Brian Carpenter for the IESG _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf