I don't think the IETF needs to be in the profile/resume business. There are plenty of other places that do a fine job already. What I do think the IETF should do is *require* that participants identify themselves. That means knowing who they are (a name and email contact) and an affiliation. For 80% of the participants, this info is not very hard to figure out (see below). But we also have participants that use obscure email handles that don't correlate to anything obvious, whether a real person or to a name in the list of registered attendees, etc. I suspect these folk are *not* intenending to be anonymous participants, but in practice they are. And yes, knowing who someone is, their background and who they work for is important to me in figuring out how to guage their input. E.g., I would likely pay more attention to an operator's comments on a proposed use case than from someone else. How to figure out who someone is: 1) look at the list of registered attendees. (but that doesn't include email addresses, so no clean way to map attendee name into email addresses being used). Also, for some reason, some people who register don't bother giving an affiliation. In some cases this is intentional, but there are others where it doesn't make sense (e.g., someone who has worked for the same employer for 10+ years and is still working for that employer). E.g., if you look at the registration list for Orland0, fully 180 names don't list affiliations -- and there are a number pretty obvious surprises in that list... 2) look at email addresses. But nowadays they are often generic (e.g., gmail) and don't correlate back to an obvious sponsor. 3) Google names, look at authorship info in RFCs, linked in, etc. Works in a lot of cases, but is sometimes more work than seems appropriate. And for those with less history in the IETF, knowing where to look for this stuff is trickier. But even doing the above, there are people participating (e.g., posting on the IETF list) who I don't know who they are, even after spending some time trying to figure who who they are and what their background is. For an open standards organization, that somehow doesn't seem quite right. Thomas