I really applaud this, thank you. https://www.ietf.org/blog/2016/06/long-term-ietf-evolution/ Fairly recently I gave a short preso [1] on what I think is a really core problem every org involved in the internet has - that bugs accumulate across layers of technology and social interaction, and breaking down the barriers of language and understanding across all layers of the stack - technical and social - is one of the key unifying things the ietf can do. I had a ton more direct comments than this, but these anecdotes are what came out of me first: ... When I first came (back) to ietf, I was making some serious progress on the bufferbloat issue, dead broke, with just enough money for airfare to canada. I got there, got a cot in jim getty's room for the week... and I appreciated very much the fact that badges were not checked at the door, and I was able to breeze in behind jim and start to make a difference. Had I not made that meeting, a bunch of things would have gone down very differently. ... Later on... One of the most single (and most accidentally) effective things I've ever done was personally cover simon kelly's (author of dnsmasq) costs to come to an ietf meeting. I'd tired of people whining about DNSSEC not getting deployed and hit upon the idea that maybe the guy responsible for over a billion dns servers in the field should maybe get a floor under him to get DNSSEC to work. That triggered meetings with other dns folk, and a meeting with a core ISP (comcast) that agreed to fund the work. It's taken 3+ years of development and bugfixing since, but DNSSEC in dnsmasq is now widely available and increasingly enabled. (and even better, I haven't had to do anything more myself on it!) Ideally I'd like there to be an ietf mechanism where "X" number of folk doing valuable work could have their costs covered for travel and attendance, to give a presentation, and intermix, for a value of X > 1 and less than 50. Perhaps a registration method where you could do something like register you and "guest" for regular ietf participants, would be more broadly applicable? ... Along these themes the costs of actual attendance are quite high in travel costs and lost work, and what ietf covers in a week impossibly broad, and yet at the same time overfocused on narrow issues at times, while ignoring huge, glaring ones. Security foci, overall, getting better, post snowden. :whew: Highly dynamic ipv6 addresses and service discovery, not so much. ... I strongly approve of more running code, before rough consensus, and whatever it takes to get that, go for it. ... In an age where you can always "find what you want" - aggressively incorporating the element of surprise, the random meeting in the hallway with a strange attractor that sends someone down a different path, seems to be an increasingly valuable. Getting different groups that are working to solve similar problems at different layers, or technologies, to have a social, or to have one meeting to describe each others work to each other, to try and struggle for a bigger picture about how all the pieces fit together, might be nice. Something like that might need to be held in a mud wrestling ring particularly when it comes to the various routing wgs! ... I'd like it if there were more, shorter meetings, somewhat overlapping and in the same locations as IEEE, ITU, and open source conferences like the LF events, etc. I'd really like to see interop events like we used to see in the old days, again, also. My overall theme - as in this message - is more mixing of academics, technologists, theorists, coders, isps, vendors, government, kids, oldsters, hipsters, freaks, lawyer, males, females, cats, dogs, etc - would help. The biggest thing I've valued from ietf meetings since starting to attend has been the chance to have a beer and short RTTs with people I argue with regularly over email. We may never see eye to eye, but we can usually agree on each others humanity, and that helps a lot. We're all trying to bring spaceship earth, in for a safe landing. That said... well... I think meetecho for handling remote attendance has got *quite good*, and perhaps robots can suffice for more face to face time. :) ... In my own case, I intend the berlin meeting to be the last one I make for a while - if I make it! it's been too hard, financially and physically, to make the last couple. My principal focus is on fixing wifi now, and while I see some interest ramping up in the ietf, most of its issues come from bad layer 2-3 interactions and the lack of good fq/aqm technologies. [2]. I'd like it if the ietf poked into the possibilities inherent in usb-c networking, also, and into exciting new technologies possible with the distributed web. I'm glad this upcoming meeting shares a town with some of the core openwrt and freifunk developers, if you can't find me in the hallways, you'll find me at c-base.org! [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWdL2Wu7M-8 "Why the insecurities"? (the last 7-8 minutes primarily) -- Dave Täht Let's go make home routers and wifi faster! With better software! [2] http://blog.cerowrt.org