SDO vs academic conference, was poster sessions

[Alessandro Vesely <[e-mail]>]

On 10/Jan/11 23:38, Fred Baker wrote:
> Personally, call me stuck-in-the-mud, but this isn't an academic
> conference in which grad students are advertising for a professor
> that might be interested in mentoring them or a sponsor might fund
> their research. This is an SDO, and internet drafts are what any
> other SDO calls "contributions" or "work in progress". I would far
> rather have people who ant to talk about something contribute an
> internet draft on their topic, and talk with other people about
> their ideas - whether on working group lists or other places. For
> those of us that *do* participate, it seems to mostly work.

OTOH, for those of us who don't participate, it doesn't :-)

My ignorance of IETF's inner functioning is so deep that I cannot even
tell what is the equivalent of a mentoring professor or a sponsoring
organization within the IETF, let alone finding one.  As an Internet
user, I may have a problem, hypothesize possible causes, and wait for
solutions to be proposed or formulate a tentative solution myself.
The question is, is the IETF the natural referent of such occurrences?
 Does the "I" in its name promote it as the universal coordinator for
Internet related issues?

I think a negative answer would affirm the view of the IETF as an SDO
only.  This would rise further questions such as who are its customers
--possibly the IGF or similar assemblies-- and what kind of mechanisms
do they use to order what has to be standardized and how.

A positive answer would imply the IETF is something more than an SDO.
Possibly the embryo of a technocracy.  That would call for more
dendritic links to the Internet at large.  For example, someone
proposed to add more entries and comments to the IETF's Outcomes Wiki.
 By symmetry, some means to campaign for input topics may also be
desirable --not necessarily poster sessions, just something that may
motivate outsiders to join the meetings.