Re: And a third [was: A couple of opinion pieces]

[Christian Huitema <[e-mail]>]

Brian,

This is an interesting piece, and I share your assessment of the IAB's
situation in the late 90's. But I continue to be very skeptical of your
references to a "much wider community".

To assess that, I just did a small exercise of listing all the RFC
published in the "independent" stream in 2018. There are 14 such RFC:
8507, 8494, 8493, 8492, 8483, 8479, 8433, 8409, 8374, 8369, 8367, 8351,
8328 and 8324. 8369 is an April's fool RFC. RFC 8367 and 8369 were
published on 1 April 2018. I looked at the authors of these RFC, and did
a quick check: are these outsiders, part of a "wider community" or are
these people who are also contributing to the IETF. The overwhelming
response is, "insiders". Pretty much all the authors are or were
involved in the IETF, many of them with a prominent track record. There
are just 2 exceptions, a single RFC in which only 3 of the 5 authors are
well associated with the IETF.

There may well be a wider community of people who could publish
independent RFC, or for that matter who could participate in the IETF.
But data analysis does not indicate that these people participate in the
RFC series.

-- Christian Huitema


On 7/14/2019 9:19 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> Various recent discussions here have made me think that the IETF is
> at a point where some fundamentals in the standards process, the
> publication process, and its basic organization need to be re-evaluated
> and perhaps changed. The goal of course would be to make the IETF more
> useful, not change for its own sake.
>
> It's above my pay grade to decide whether to start an organized
> approach to this, but in addition to the two opinion pieces mentioned
> below, please also consider this:
> https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~brian/CommentaryIAB.pdf
> This is about the institution, not the people. Please read the opening
> disclaimer, and of course comments are welcome, as always.
>
> Regards
>    Brian Carpenter
>
> On 20-Jun-19 16:24, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> The first document is early input to the 2019-2020 NomCom and to
>> all those thinking of volunteering for it, or for any of the
>> open leadership positions:
>>
>> Some Thoughts on IETF Community Leadership
>> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-carpenter-community-leaders-01
>>
>> The second one is also relevant to NomCom, but also to those who
>> will be involved in the process of identifying the future RFC Series
>> Editor, and to those who care about the IETF standards process in general:
>>
>> Request for Comments
>> https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-carpenter-request-for-comments-01
>>
>> Comments are most welcome, but these documents are both personal opinions.
>>  
>> Regards
>>    Brian Carpenter
>>