As the original blog poster, let me answer and expand a bit: Jeroen Massar wrote: > What is defined as an 'end-user'? > You, me, the rest of the people, are all end-users IMHO. > >From those one billion Internet users, there are several millions IT professionals who do not participate in the IETF work either because they are not inclined to, or because their employer does not see which return such time investment would bring to the company. They provide services to millions of end users and they are confronted on a daily basis with issues that could be addressed by enhancing or drafting new standards. These people have the knowledge. They are not "hobbyists". Over the last ten years, I explained a zillion times to my management, workmates, etc. why e-mail addresses cannot contain accented characters, only to be asked when the IT department of the organization is going to "fix it". This is the archetypical example of an issue that has been known since the days of RFC821/822. Yet, work to address this has only started a year ago, although I am conscious there were some intermediate step needed, like Unicode. Please don't ask me to complain to my software vendor. At best, I am being told that their software is standards-compliant. So, if the end user/customer cannot get the supplier to proactively propose new standards, there has to be a way to escalate the issue to whatever body that can solve it. My proposal for the IETF would be to ask the actual users, large and small, through different mechanisms to be defined, what are the issues that limit their use of the Internet, see what is relevant to the IETF work and assign priorities to the development of new standards. As for the average end user: I am sure that my grandfather would have liked to be able to type an e-mail, including recipient names, with accented characters. He was already able to do so for letters and envelopes on his typing machine in the 1920's. My neighbour may not know what an IPv6 /64 is. He may however understand that he will have a lot of home devices connected to the Internet on his home network in a few years from now, and this may require some segmentation, which a /64 does not provide. Actually, I hope my neighbour will never have to know about these details, and that his home router will figure this out automatically. Patrick Vande Walle -- Patrick Vande Walle Check my blog at http://patrick.vande-walle.eu Jabber me at patrick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf