The IETF's problems

[Iljitsch van Beijnum]

As a relative newcomer (2 years active on a mailinglist for a wg, 
Atlanta was my first IETF meeting and this is my second) this is what I 
think are the IETF's main problems.

To me, it's not very clear whether the IETF wants to be a top-down 
standards organization or a bottom-up place where people with good 
ideas can work together to make those ideas even better. When both the 
IETF leadership and members of the community feel some work is valuable 
there isn't much of a problem, but when people bring work to the IETF 
that the wg chair / area director / IAB infrastructure doesn't 
recognize as important, this often leads to unhappiness. Now obviously 
this is somewhat unavoidable because of the open structure of the IETF: 
"anyone with time on their hands and a keyboard can write a draft". But 
when even large vendors are unable to get protocols that they feel is 
important (and have implemented or are implementing) "through" IETF, 
there is a problem.

The other major problem for the IETF is that it doesn't manage its 
resources very well. The major resource the IETF has is the combined 
intelligence of a large number of very capable individuals, many of 
which are under no obligation to spend time on a given subject, but do 
so because they want to contribute to the community. The only thing the 
IETF has to offer in return is a little (usually very little) 
recognition. The part that I don't understand is that there is no real 
structure for technical review in place. The IETF almost exclusively 
relies on unsollicited comments from the membership at large, and on 
the efforts of the IESG.

Meetings aren't always effectively chaired. People line up at the 
microphones and address any subject they want, rather than that all 
issues are dealt with one at a time. Many other aspects of meetings 
aren't thought out very well either. The overlap in sessions is very 
bad, whith no apparent rhyme or reason. It also seems strange to me 
that there should be fixed breaks for meals. Eg: now wg A and wg B 
overlap, and then we all eat. If wg A and wg B are scheduled after each 
other, people who only want to attend one can still eat, but people who 
really want to attend both can do so if they feel this is important 
enough to skip a meal. (Due to timezone and cultural differences not 
everyone wants to eat at the same time anyway.)

A non-problem: everyone seems to assume that everyone who shows up for 
a session is an active member of the wg. That isn't the case. Many 
people just wander in to see what's happening in a group that seems 
interesting as they're there anyway.

Then there is the fact that the IETF has no collective memory, but only 
a rewind button. There are posts to mailinglists, comments in meetings 
that may or may not be recorded for future generations and drafts that 
are guarantueed to disappear in 6 months, and RFCs. This means any and 
all results either entirely disappear or are relegated to the obscurity 
of long forgotten mailinglist archives, or they must be published as 
RFCs. There is no middle ground.

About the RFCs: there are simply too many. Maybe at some point issuing 
a new RFC number for each update of a document made sense, but 
constantly having to search through the index to find the new number 
for an update (titles could be better too, searching can be hard at 
times) doesn't really increase productivity.