Re: Continuing the story - another stab at an IETF mission statement

["Tom Petch" <[e-mail]>]

I find your definition of the Internet delightfully ambiguous.  I was
taught that the Internet (as opposed to an internet or the internet) was
the public network accessible through public IPv4 addresses (this predates
IPv6) ie the Internet ceased at a firewall or other such IP level gateway.

Reading your definition, I cannot tell where you stand; are firewalls and
networks behind them included in IETF mission or not?

Tom Petch

-----Original Message-----
From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail] <[e-mail]>
Date: 11 February 2004 01:59
Subject: Continuing the story - another stab at an IETF mission statement


>Apologies to those who are already tired of this debate, and those think
>that we have enough of a clear idea of what the IETF mission is, and that
>discussing more is harmful to the community, but....
>
>I attempted to incorporate the latest discussions into an internet-draft,
>which I managed to get out just before the deadline....
>
>   draft-alvestrand-ietf-mission-00.txt
>
>The core of the draft:
>
>
>   The goal of the IETF is to make the Internet work.
>
>   The mission of the IETF is to produce high quality, relevant
>   technical and engineering documents that influence the way people
>   design, use and manage the Internet in such a way as to make the
>   Internet work better.
>   These documents include protocol standards, best current practices
>   and informational documents of various kinds.
>
>   The IETF will pursue this mission in adherence to the following
>   cardinal principles:
>
>   Open process - that any interested participant can in fact
>      participate in the work, know what is being decided, and make his
>      or her voice heard on the issue.  Part of this principle is our
>      commitment to making our documents, our WG mailing lists, our
>      attendance lists and our meeting minutes publicly available on the
>      Net.
>
>   Technical competence - that the issues on which the IETF produces its
>      documents are issues where the IETF has the competence needed to
>      speak to them, and that the IETF is willing to listen to
>      technically competent input from any source.
>      Technical competence also means that we expect IETF output to be
>      designed to sound network engineering principles - this is also
>      often referred to as "engineering quality".
>
>   Volunteer Core - that our members and our leadership are people who
>      come to the IETF because they want to work for the IETF's
>      purposes.
>
>   Rough consensus and running code - We make standards based on the
>      combined engineering judgement of our participants and our real-
>      world experience in implementing and deploying our specifications.
>
>
>The rest of the document is trying to define the terms and explain the
>issues faced in formulating the mission statement.
>An appendix (to be deleted before publication) lists some other attempts
at
>formulating a mission statement - the purpose of including this is to give
>honor to those who worked on them, and to allow those who debate the issue
>to see what other attempts to formulate the mission could look like.
>
>Comments are welcome, of course!
>
>                      Harald
>
>