Proposed statement quotes wrong numbers

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand]

Christian,

thanks for the correction.
We can quibble about the exact dates for a while, but I've made the quip 
quite a few times that the IETF has a fine scalable management structure, 
which will scale all the way to 700 participants...... so I agree that 
"order of magnitude" is a misnomer.

We do, however, have trouble, even at our currently reduced size.

                 Harald

--On 23. oktober 2003 22:40 -0700 Christian Huitema 
<huitema at windows.microsoft.com> wrote:

> 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
>