MAJOR ISSUE: Causes of "problems"

[Bernard Aboba]

If a "problem" now exists where formerly there was none, a logical
question to ask is "what changed?"

So I'm curious as to what people think some of the underlying *causes* of
the "problems" are.  There has been discussion of an increase in
complexity due to the need to address security.

Another potential cause for discussion: scope expansion.

It can be argued that two of the major trends of the last few years are
"IP Everywhere" and "Ethernet everywhere".  No surprise then that both the
IETF and IEEE 802 have grown considerably over the period, incorporating
work that might have previously been handled in other standards bodies and
forums.

For example, over the last 5 years, the IETF has expanded its scope to
work on topics such as VOIP, SUB-IP, RDMA, IP Storage, etc.

Each of those expansions has required the IETF to accomodate a new group
of attendees, so that today many IETF partipants also participate in other
standards bodies such as ITU, ATM/Frame Relay/MPLS forum, 3GPP, 3GPP2,
IEEE 802, InfiniBand Trade Association, T10/T11, etc.

This is a bit akin to a company executing a series of mergers over the
years, trying to knit a patch work quilt of acquisitions into a coherent
whole.  It's difficult to do even with good management and lots of
resources -- but in the case of the IETF, additional management
bandwidth and resources may not necessarily be considered during the
scope expansion discussion.

So is "scope expansion" a potential *cause* of "problems"? Or is it a
"problem" in its own right?