This mail is not about technology changes and trends that we all work on. But I would like to get some help understanding some of the non-technical changes around the IETF, that affect how we should run our operations. Changing participation, changing forms of co-operation, changing landscapes in the area of standards organisations, open source, and so on. This mail has been inspired by involvement in various decisions that the IETF leadership has to take part in. I find myself often wishing to be able to draw more on the understanding trends and their impact on the IETF. I wanted to setup a short-term design team to make a list (a memo) of these trends and how they may be affecting the IETF. Specifically, I am soliciting for additional person(s) to help with this. Having such a document would be useful when dealing with various IETF related topics - be it about new forms of working together like the Hackathon, new people and new topics, ongoing industry transformations, sponsorship - it is essential to have an understanding of the trends around us, how they affect the IETF. I’d like to make better decisions, and, ultimately, I think we all in the community would like to form our general stance towards various broader changes. Some examples may help illustrate this. The growth of the importance of open source in networking technology is one example where I think we have common recognition of the trend, and, I think, pretty strong agreement in the IETF that we need to be a part of that, helping open source world to work with the IETF where standards are needed, seeing a world where standards and open source support each other, and generally make it easier to interact between different efforts. Similarly, we were recently asked if we wanted to hold an IETF Hackathon outside the IETF meetings. Timing did not make it possible to even think about that opportunity, but it opened up a broader question of what is the scope that we are trying to achieve in our efforts. The world around us uses Hackathon-type events a lot in many different contexts, Is our target within an IETF meeting, in existing and new IETF participants attending those meetings? Or is our goal broader, such as additional engagement in the tech community in using new technology coming out of IETF? A third example is funding. We need to understand what evolution we will see in our funding and sponsorship model, amidst changing meeting participation style (such as remote participation) or the increasingly professionally run services that we host. Being able to understand where we are headed is not just important for us. It is also important when we communicate with our sponsors or with ISOC, who funds a big part of our operations. There is a lot of willingness to fund the IETF from all of these sources, I’m happy to report! :-) But still, we need to tell our friends what we want. And we need to have a long-term view of this. The fourth example is perhaps borderline technical, but does the focus on programmable (“software defined”) technology somehow impact how we work at the IETF? Some of the items on a list of changes may be obvious, some not, but even for the obvious parts I have found that writing down the commonly agreed truths is useful in increasing our focus on dealing with those truths. And some of the topics mentioned above probably eventually deserve their own, in-depth treatment in a thread or document of their own. But as the first step, I would like to get to at least identifying the trends that we need to talk about. Please contact me in the next couple of days if you are interested in helping on this topic! Jari
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