Author and attendance measurements [Was: Re: Thought experiment [Re: Quality of Directorate reviews]]

[Jari Arkko <jari.arkko@xxxxxxxxx>]

My impression from the regular plenary reports on attendance my impression is
that the number of people involved in the IETF is declining, yet the number
of RFCs being processed is going up.

I think the reports tell you that persons in meetings is going down. I’m not sure we have data to say number of people involved is declining. Could be offset by people who are remote in the meetings or people who only use mailing lists but still participate effectively.

The number of RFCs is not going up, it went up (peaking at 2006 and 2011) and has been in somewhat of a decline since then. See https://arkko.com/tools/rfcstats/pubdistr.html and https://www.rfc-editor.org/report-summary/ (Note that on my stats the last year numbers are always a bit off, because the years aren’t complete. So don’t look at 2019 too much.)

And the number of conflicts seems to be going up because so many more people
are involved in quite a range of WGs.   How does this compare to ten years
ago?  I'm not even sure I know what number I want to ask for here.

Jari, can you tell if we have more unique authors from your stats system?
Are we individually producing more documents?  Are we collaborating across
communities more often, which is why we have more conflicts?

It seems like it must be that more of the people involved are writing
documents.  Did we have more people who were exclusively "tourists" before?

I don’t have an easy way to answer all your questions. I did pull the following stats from my server though. These are the unique authors (or explicitly named contributors) in RFCs published per year. So, the number of distinct people who published at least one RFC. (Note: again, don’t look at 2019, and I don’t have a good way of assessing how accurate the author identification is over all RFCs. Reader beware.)

2001 396
2002 408
2003 454
2004 448
2005 561
2006 713
2007 582
2008 509
2009 490
2010 630
2011 703
2012 599
2013 537
2014 562
2015 698
2016 711
2017 630
2018 541

2019 370

The highest levels of unique authors occurred in 2006, 2011, and 2016. The two of the first years co-incide with high RFC production levels, but 2016 did not. Eyeballing this, I’d say the number of unique authors seems to vary but I don’t see a recent drop-off. Pretty healthy numbers I’d say, even, if 600-700 people manage to publish RFCs and the meetings draw 900-1100 people.

I have anecdotal impression that conflicts are up because there’s a set of people who are key contributors across multiple areas and WGs. I could dig up some further stats on that, but not right now.

Jari