A 100.000 foot perspective on "what is the problem"

Juergen Schoenwaelder schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de
Fri, 13 Dec 2002 16:31:20 +0100


>>>>> Harald Tveit Alvestrand writes:

Harald> 1) The standards activity in the WGs could function better.

Harald> 2) The IESG does not have capacity to do more work.

There might be another probably hidden problem:

x) There is a lack of a common understanding what the IETF's primary
   goals and customers are.

On the one extreme, we have people who believe that the IETF today
produces standards primarily for keeping the business around Internet
protocols growing and producing money. On the other extreme are people
who believe the IETF produces standards to make the original Internet
architecture even more successful for the goodness of ubiquitous open
data communication in all parts of the world. And there are of course
lots of variations between such extremes.

I think that many of the discussions I have followed on this list
during the last few days are just not converging due to a lack of a
common understanding of the primary goals and customers of IETF
standardization work. Many of the little process optimizations that
were suggested just happen to make more or less sense depending on
which position you take.

[But perhaps this is really too high-level to be useful...]

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder    <http://www.informatik.uni-osnabrueck.de/schoenw/>