Dear Colleagues,
Here is the IAB report for the period between IETF 103 and IETF 104. If you have issues you want to discuss by email, feel free to send your comments to architecture-discuss@xxxxxxx (our public discussion list) or iab@xxxxxxx (to reach just the IAB). Questions at the open mic at IETF 104 are, of course, also welcome.
The IAB has a few chartered roles. It confirms the appointments to the IESG, performs standards process oversight, and handles appeals. It also performs architectural oversight (including appointing the IRTF Chair), appoints the RFC series editor and oversight committee, manages the IETF's relationship with IANA, and handles liaisons and appointments both to ISOC and to other organizations.
Here's what the IAB has been doing since our last report; more detail on many of the topics is available at https://www.iab.org..
There was an appeal during this period, received from Shyam Bandyopadhyay requesting review of the transparency of the procedures of the Independent submission stream of the RFC Series. The IAB response was posted on February 19, 2019.
The changes in meeting practice since 103 have gone smoothly; there have been a number of observers at IAB teleconferences. A number of the attendees were potential candidates for the IAB (then under consideration by the NomCom), and we hope that in future other candidates for the IAB will avail themselves of the same opportunity.
As part of its appointments role, the IAB has filled a number of positions since our last report. One of those was for the ISOC BoT; the new candidate has been approved and confirmed. The details have been shared with the chair of the ISOC elections committee, which will announce the full slate of new Trustees when the other election processes have completed.
Another major role was for the position of IRTF Chair. There were a number of strong candidates, and the IAB process was necessarily long as a result. Dr. Colin Perkins has been appointed; he will take up the role at IETF 104. The IAB is grateful to Allison Mankin for her service as Chair.
In addition, the IAB appointed Warren Kumari to the ICANN Technical Liaison Group.
DOCUMENTS
You can always find the documents the IAB has adopted and is working on at https://datatracker.ietf..org/stream/iab.
Two documents have been approved for publication since the last report, though they have not yet been issued as RFCs.
Transport Protocol Path Signals (draft-iab-path-signals)
The Wire Image of a Network Protocol (draft-iab-wire-image)
Both are products of the IAB’s Stack Evolution Program, which has been considering the behavior of on-path network elements which observe network flows, especially when these are encrypted.
PROGRAMS
The IAB organizes its work, for the most part, into programs. There are basically two classes: management programs and architectural programs. The former are how we handle the oversight of various things, and the latter are where we do architectural work. The former are expected to last as long as the IAB continues to have that oversight function; the latter last until the IAB has come to a conclusion on the relevant group of topics or has decided that the topic needs to be reframed. Programs are listed at https://www.iab.org/activities/programs/. As a general rule, each architectural program has a public mailing list, as well as a member-specific list. For subscription instructions, see https://www.iab.org/iab-mailing-lists/..
The Plenary Planning Program added Xiaodong Lee as a member during this period and the Privacy and Security program added Roman Danyliw, who is an incoming Security Area Director.
WORKSHOPS
In our last report, we noted that the IAB then had two workshops in preparation. Both were delayed as their topic focus and audiences shifted during the course of workshop preparation. Where the CIPE workshop was originally broadly treating concentration and asymmetry, the current proposal is to narrow that to examining the impact of concentrated, centralized deployments which emerged in protocols designed for distributed operation. The timing of that workshop is currently targeted for June, should other assumptions on logistics hold. The joint workshop with the W3C will now likely shift from a broad ecosystem review to a meeting focused on the potential impact of signed http exchanges . While that may still take place as a workshop, the liaison aspects of the work are also clearly important, as it touches on work at the W3C, WHATWG, and the IETF.
Respectfully submitted,
Ted Hardie
for the IAB
