Taking a step back for a moment, see why are we interested in measuring
something? You measure to see how effective you are at reaching your
goals. So what are the goals of any IETF activity? Presumably it's *not*
to produce RFCs, or to exchange ideas, or even to consume pastry. I
respectfully submit for your flaying and filleting that the core goal of
the IETF is to promote interactive communications through the
development of open protocols.
It's an interesting question. RFC 3160 says (about the IETF):
Its mission includes:
- Identifying, and proposing solutions to, pressing
operational and technical problems in the Internet;
- Specifying the development or usage of protocols and the
near-term architecture to solve such technical problems for
the Internet;
- Making recommendations to the Internet Engineering Steering
Group (IESG) regarding the standardization of protocols and
protocol usage in the Internet;
- Facilitating technology transfer from the Internet Research
Task Force (IRTF) to the wider Internet community; and
- Providing a forum for the exchange of information within the
Internet community between vendors, users, researchers,
agency contractors, and network managers.
If the goal of the IETF is to do good protocol design, than one metric
of whether we are doing our job correctly is by how frequently our
protocols fail or have "unintended interactions." Since we can't
legislate the use of IETF protocols on the Internet, we must sometimes
rely on our track record of doing things right to motivate people to
choose an IETF standard over doing their own thing. If we turn out
junk, we'll loose that "moral authority." I'm not saying that things
shouldn't break on the Internet. But the things that break should be
IETF protocols interfering with each other.
--aaron