I think the problems are rather more complex.
From what I hear, protocol design work is not highly rated by tenure
committees, nor is authorship of RFCs. The type of papers that count for
tenure are the ones that nobody in the field reads.
A lot of the problems we face are not the type of problem that academics can
get credit for solving. Or if they can get credit it is for the wrong type
of solution.
When people move from industry to take a tenure track teaching job their
IETF participation almost always dries up shortly afterward.
From the industrial perspective, the three stage process is a budget killer.
When budgets get tight it is much harder to justify research staff working
on standards if they are not producing standards.
There are perfectly rational career advantages that cause people to drive
work to W3C or OASIS in preference to IETF. The competing institutions offer
a much more predictable process and a very high likelihood of a clear cut
success. In the IETF in contrast getting a document to DRAFT status has to
be explained as a victory. And that leaves a manager vulnerable when they
are trying to justify budgets against other departments.
On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 5:48 PM, Bob Braden <braden(_at_)isi(_dot_)edu> wrote:
Tony,
I note that there seems to be some correlation between the degradation of
the IETF process and
the disappearance of the Internet research community from the IETF (the US
government
decided that no further R&D funding was required, since the Internet was
"done".)
Bob Braden
It would work if the overall process were more efficient. Now we
effectively
go WG I-D to full IS, which is what your eloquent overview of the driving
force notes. If we truncated WG I-D at the common points people could
agree
to start implementing, and have PS actually document the evolution of the
implementations, we would get back closer to when the IETF was productive.
...
Tony
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