IESG proposed statement on the IETF mission

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand]

Greetings,

As part of the discussions about change process within
the IETF, the IESG has come to believe that a somewhat longer statement of 
the IETF's mission and social dynamics might provide useful context for the 
community's discussion.  As part of that, we'd like to put the following 
document out for feedback.

It incorporates lots of ideas and some text from existing RFCs
and IETF web pages, but is more focused on change than those have
been.  We hope it captures a sense of the context of the work of
improving the IETF, by capturing some of the social dynamics which
have been an implicit part of the IETF's work and style over the years.

We also hope that by making some of those implicit elements more
explicit, we may find it easier to understand how to make changes
that will "go with the grain" of the IETF's history and culture.

We'd be happy to have feedback on it, either sent to the IETF list
for public discussion or to the IESG.  This is an informal piece of work, 
and may never be published in RFC form, but may rather appear on the IETF 
web pages somewhere.

Your comments are welcome!

		Harald Alvestrand
		For the IESG

-------------- next part --------------

		The IETF Mission and Social Contract


Introduction
------------

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a large open
international community of network engineers concerned with the
evolution of the Internet architecture and facilitating the
operation of the Internet.  In the seventeen years since thirty-odd
engineers first met in a single room, the Internet and the IETF
have grown considerably; the IETF is attempting to adapt to these
changes.

Most of the basic processes and the social contracts by which the
IETF works, both formal and informal, were developed when it was a
community of fifty to two hundred engineers.  Much of its internal
communication depended on long-term personal relationships and an
implicit understanding of shared goals and culture.  This has
worked well for many years and much growth.  The IETF has been and
is a very successful organization, and has produced much serious
work which has both furthered its own goals of Internet evolution
and had a notable effect on global human society.

The processes and social contracts that worked for fifty engineers
have managed to sustain the IETF in dealing with a community of
thousands of engineers and a greatly expanded technology and market
space.  However, while Dave Clark's famous saying

  "We do not believe in kings, presidents, or voting.
   We believe only in rough consensus and running code,"

is still a touchstone of the IETF culture, the rapid growth of
participation in the IETF, the growth of the Internet itself,
and the rapid integration of Internet technology in  real-world markets
and society in general are seriously straining the IETF's traditional 
understated and informal communication and methods.

Though the process of organizational change has actually been going
on continuously for a long time, it would be useful to state more
formally many previously implicit understandings and to make
explicit some previously informal processes.  This note tries to
lay the social foundation for that continuing journey.


The IETF Mission
----------------

The IETF's mission has historically been embedded in a shared
understanding that making engineering choices based on the long
term interest of the Internet as a whole produces better long-term
results for each participant than making choices based on short term
considerations, because the value of those advantages is ultimately
derived from the health of the whole.  The long term interest of the
Internet includes the premise that "the Internet is for everyone".

Two years ago, the IESG felt that making the mission of the IETF
more explicit was needed.  The following terse statement has since
been promulgated, first by IESG members and then by others:

   "The purpose of the IETF is to create high quality, relevant,
    and timely standards for the Internet."

Note that this clearly positions the IETF primarily as a standards
development organization.  There are other activities in the IETF;
but if the IETF does not do its core mission, all else will quickly
fade.  This is intended to be an ordered list of characteristics. 
Timely standards of low quality or that are irrelevant will not 
serve the Internet's or the IETF's needs.

This leaves open the very interesting and difficult questions of
how to measure quality, relevance, and timeliness.  The IETF
has identified interoperability, security, and scalability as essential,
but without attaching measurements to those characteristics.

It is important that this is "For the Internet,"  and does not include 
everything that happens to use IP.  IP is being used in a myriad of 
real-world applications, such as controlling street lights, but the 
IETF does not standardize those applications.


Supporting Missions
-------------------

Historically, the IETF has also been a place for experimentation,
both with protocols and with operational practices.  Testbeds such
as the mbone, 6bone, etc., have been born, coordinated within, 
and run in association with the IETF.  Such efforts have been very
useful in developing high quality relevant standards.

The IETF has also had a strong operational component, with a tight
bond, and hence coordination, between protocol developers and
network operators, and has had many participants who did both.
This has provided valuable feedback to allow correction of
misguided standardization efforts, and has provided feedback to
sort out which standards were actually needed.  As the field has
grown explosively, specialization has set in, and market pressures
have risen, there has been less and less operator participation in
the IETF.


Social Dynamics
---------------

Growth has stressed many parts of the IETF's social and procedural
fabric, and it may be useful to consider some fundamental forces
that are causing these stresses.  As they are neither good nor bad,
it is not appropriate to call them "problems;" rather think of them
as social forces and dynamics.

Scaling - Increased Participation

The IETF is a semi-formal community of individual engineers, not of
organizations, expert in and dedicated to the growth and technical
development of the Internet.  With the popularity and explosive
growth of the Internet, the number and diversity of people wanting
or needing to participate in the IETF has grown a hundredfold.
Many of these have had experience in other standards orgizations
with different operating procedures and focus.  As good engineers,
these new participants have opinions, want to contribute, need to
find a place in the complex social and technology fabric, and, in
general, want to join the jostle of a now large organization.  As
the size and scope of the IETF have increased, the informal
mechanisms for incorporating new participants have been strained,
often creating the appearance of opaque barriers to entry.

Scaling - More Complex Technical Interactions

The number and span of interacting technologies has made the IETF a
far more complex work space, both technically and socially.  A
culture that worked for layers three and four and 50-300 engineers
is being severely stretched working at layers one through nine.
Furthermore, many new participants now come from a far wider set of
disciplines, making integration more difficult.

Scaling - More External Interactions

As the Internet has become widely popular, it has become a serious
marketplace and is being seen as the communication infrastructure
of the future.  This has drawn serious attention from external
forces such as vendors, press, regulators, politicians, and other
standards organizations, whose traditional work now interacts with
that of the IETF.  Often, the relationship turns out to be
tangential, but it takes a long time to get all parties to see
this.  The resultant need for quality interaction with these
external forces places new needs and stresses on the IETF's view of
how it represents itself.

Quality and Architectural Review

With the increase in complexity, it has become increasingly
difficult to maintain the high quality that the IETF has always
demanded.  A bit of engineering in one space can and usually does
interact with many other components of the Internet, and thus
requires deep multi-area review and consensus.  This has been most
easily seen with security and operational scaling considerations,
but actually happens across the board.

As the number of engineers and work areas increases, the number of
documents increases, and the resulting importance of and
interactions needed for inter-area quality coordination and review
grows as a product of these forces.

Replacing Personalities with Process

As the IETF grows and evolves, leaders come and go.  Hence, the
organization needs processes to both ensure continuity as leaders
succeed each other, and to ensure that the organization remains
open and fair, and can continue to interact successfully with the
more complex environment in which the IETF now operates.

But Not Too Much Process

On the other hand, the IETF culture has always been to have formal
processes grow only as needed, and it has resisted unneeded formal
structures as impeding timeliness and driving out key players.
There is deep cultural distrust of 'professional standards goers',
for Dave Clark's kings and presidents, and for institutional
authority.

Tension Among the Dynamics

Many of the above dynamics are in tension with each other; the IETF
can not always have its cake and eat it too.  One of the most
critical tensions is the increase in the number of documents and
the need for cross-technology review.  The number of articulate
engineers who have wide technological span and can and will review
a lot of documents is not growing as fast as the document count.


Changing What We Can Change
---------------------------------------------

These social dynamics can be seen as underlying drivers of many of
the problems identified by those attempting to improve the IETF.  As
part of the effort to diagnose those problems, identifying which of
the underlying forces are or are not within the control of the IETF is an
important aspect of targeting change.  For those within the control of
the IETF, a relatively small but fundamental change may engender
substantial improvements in a number of areas.  For those outside of
the control of the IETF, changes may need to focus on ameliorating symptoms
of the underlying problem or on enabling the community to work within
the identified constraints.  

As part of the ongoing effort to improve the IETF, there will always
be a number of specific proposals coming forward for discussion.  Some
may ask the community to consider changes to existing assumptions or
structures; others may be intended to provide specific solutions to
problems which require them.  As those proposals emerge, the first
step must be to recognize that the IETF will change over time, both as
the community's membership changes and as the work it does evolves.
In adapting the mechanisms by which the IETF operates, we are simply
recognizing that reality.  

No matter what type of change is proposed, however, it is essential to
make sure that the IETF continues to serve its basic mission well.
That mission not only supports an industry and enables a technology;
it makes the IETF as a community more than the sum of its parts.