Proposed statement quotes wrong numbers

[Christian Huitema]

The statement that you issued repeatedly mentions that the IETF rules
and social contract were establish at a time when the IETF had 50 to 250
or 50 to 300 members. The obvious implication is that, since the
attendance has grown by an order of magnitude, the rules have to change
significantly.

The problem is that the 50-300 numbers are wrong. The original rules of
the IETF were indeed devised in 1986, when the IETF was just created and
had maybe 30-50 members. However, the current rules were designed in
1992-1993, in large part because the IETF had outgrown the previous
rules. If you look at http://www.ietf.org/meetings/past.meetings.html,
you will see that the attendance then was in the 500-700 range. Dave
Clark's statement was made during the 24th IETF, held July 13-17, 1992
in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There were 677 attendees.

Since then, the IETF has grown, and then shrunk. The current size is
about double the size of 1992. That is significant, but not quite an
order of magnitude.

-- Christian Huitema