[irtf-discuss] Re: [Green] [E-impact] Re: Draft Charter for an IRTF Proposed Research Group: Sustainability and the Internet Research Group (SUSTAIN RG)

["Ali Rezaki (Nokia)" <[e-mail]>]

Dear colleagues,

Thanks a lot for your e-mails regarding the SUSTAIN RG charter over the last couple of days. Much appreciated.

Regarding what should be included in the charter, like metrics definitions, carbon as well as renewable energy considerations, or how focused the RG should be on creating input/impact for Green WG, there are a couple of guiding considerations:

- IRTF goals: the attached slides on "Goals of the IRTF' have been shown at IETF 121 last week at the beginning of IRTF Open (1) and almost all of the RG sessions (2), respectively. This differentiates how IRTF RGs operate as compared to IETF WGs. 
- SUSTAIN RG Vision, as indicated in the  current charter draft, 
- Involvement of researchers that will work on a given topic and deliver.

Additionally, we are looking to strike a balance between a wide systems scope to do justice to the comprehensive sustainability challenges and a narrow deliverable and topic portfolio to create focus and ensure manageable outputs.

Accordingly, let's view the SUSTAIN RG charter draft and output with a wide perspective but a small number of topics to create momentum and a successful take-off.

Thanks very much for your contributions.

Best regards,

Ali
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]> 
Sent: Saturday, November 9, 2024 3:58 PM
To: Wes Hardaker <[e-mail]>
Cc: [e-mail]
Subject: [irtf-discuss] Re: [Green] [E-impact] Re: Draft Charter for an IRTF Proposed Research Group: Sustainability and the Internet Research Group (SUSTAIN RG)


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Wes, *:

In general, what you describe is a noble goal, and the IETF ANIMA WG that i co-chair came out of this very process from NMRG RFCs, so i do recommend that option whenever it is applicable.

However, in the case of sustain, my gut feeling is that the scope of interest may be far larger than what may directly get into standardization in IETF, and we should not unnecessarily exclude that broader scope.

For example, i mentioned a layer of analytics required to deduce better fine-grained power metrics from less granular/accurate or even dispersed sources of power information.
Research, especially practical one in this area would very much help to derive more analysis and would ultimately end up being a core part of larger systems involving GREEN-WG measurements. But just like algorithms/methods in e.g.: PCE/SDE controllers, this type of research results barely translates into direct IETF output - but it is needed to make the IETF work more useful.

Cheers
    Toerless

On Sat, Nov 09, 2024 at 03:31:21AM -0800, Wes Hardaker wrote:
> Michael Welzl <[e-mail]> writes:
>
> > The SUSTAIN RG will be different. We have a general plan to 
> > constructively work towards sustainability in networking; of course 
> > we want to help the GREEN WG if we can, etc. etc. -
>
> A potentially bold suggestion: Since the IRTF has always had the goal 
> of executing research that eventually helps drive the forward 
> direction of the IETF, maybe this would be a good opportunity to 
> actually put into the wording of the charter that the goal of SUSTAIN 
> is to rapidly produce research results that can directly drive toward 
> solutions that can be implemented in IETF WGs like GREEN.
>
> The careful thing to avoid, hopefully "of course", is not to state 
> that SUSTAIN has the ability to force a particular WG to do something 
> -- it's more to document a hopefully direct relationship.  I think the 
> wording would need to be done carefully (and I'm not sure my sentence 
> above is perfect, as such).
>
> --
> Wes Hardaker
> USC/ISI

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