On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 12:24:37PM +0100, Alessandro Vesely wrote: > My ignorance of IETF's inner functioning is so deep that I cannot even > tell what is the equivalent of a mentoring professor or a sponsoring > organization within the IETF, let alone finding one. As an Internet > user, I may have a problem, hypothesize possible causes, and wait for > solutions to be proposed or formulate a tentative solution myself. > The question is, is the IETF the natural referent of such occurrences? Nope. > Does the "I" in its name promote it as the universal coordinator for > Internet related issues? I think the more critical letter is the "E" in the name. It is an engineering organization; that is, it is a place where engineers can get together to collaborate on engineering problems. There are several steps between "a user having a problem", and "working together on an engineering solution". Some of these steps might include include, "gathering requirements from end-users to figure out what a valid solution to their problem might look like" (as we all know, what users *think* is the problem isn't always the problem; and just because a truck driver is the 'customer' of the bridge does not make a truck driver competent to design bridges), and "figuring out whether there are enough customers who are willing to pay at the right price point so it is economically viable to put engineers to work on a problem". Those are both areas where the IETF does not function well; which is fine, that's not its job. So if you are an Internet user, you should talk to your providers, and tell them your problems. It's admittedly easier if you are a CIO of a major company, and can tell a few router companies, "fix this problem and my next $10 million order will go your company." If you don't have that kind of buying power, maybe you can get a large number of like-minded users together and together you'll have enough buying power to attract the attention of companies. Or, if you have enough technical expertise that you can design internet protocols by yourself, the IETF is open to submissions from anyone; not just large companies who receive $10 million purchase orders from aforementioned CIO's. But you have to bring your own engineering talent. It's unlikely you will be able to get people to do work for you for free. (The same is true for the open source projects, BTW; if you want some feature which isn't already in open source software, you can either pay to have it developed, or you can do it yourself. "Open" means that you can have your choices of which company or engineer you hire to do the work. It's like buying a car which does not have its hood locked so that mechanics at the car dealership have a monopoly on fixing your problem. But having a car which does not have its hood welded shut does not mean that car maintenance gets done for free; just that there's honest competition for your car maintenance dollars.) > I think a negative answer would affirm the view of the IETF as an SDO > only. It's an SDO only. > A positive answer would imply the IETF is something more than an SDO. > Possibly the embryo of a technocracy. That would call for more > dendritic links to the Internet at large. For example, someone > proposed to add more entries and comments to the IETF's Outcomes Wiki. And once you tell us how you plan to pay for all of these engineers to do the work proposed on an "Outcomes Wiki", maybe we could talk about such a hypothetical organization. But for now, capitalism, and customer buying products which fund companies to send engineers to IETF meetings is the only model I know of which has been proven to work. Best regards, - Ted _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf