Umm, having worked for a different standards organization (the OSF and The
Open Group) and being somewhat familiar with their current operations,
now, I can say the following:
Back when I worked at OSF, it had about 325 employees and some additional
number of sabbaticals and contractors not counted as employees, spread
across 3 continents. Of course, it actually implemented or integrated
quite a bit of code, or specified and supervised the work done at other
companies, as well as evaluated a ton-load more code from other companies.
Having had a key to the technoloy submission room, I can attest to the
vastness of these submissions. That was then. Later I was a consultant
to The Open Group as it merged the activities of X/Open and the X
Consortium and downsized to its current form. The current operations are
much, much leaner. But they do not generally develop code any more,
except in the Research group, which is also much, much smaller. Unlike
the IETF, The Open Group is involved in the administration of technology
licencing and collection of royalties and all that is involved with that.
There are probably other differences that I am not aware of.
One may be fond of the phrase 'order of magnitude smaller', but I don't
think it bears close scrutiny. I don't want to say that these 9.33 people
in the secretariate aren't doing their job, or that they aren't necessary.
I don't have sufficient information to judge that. That is really the task
of the executive director. But how they are organized, what their work
is, and what, if anything, can be automated, does seem to be a reasonable
question. Platitudes are not sufficient.
However, I would repeat a previous criticism of the IETF operations as
being sloppy on the administration of its process, particularly in regard
to the execution of the IETF process rules regarding when and how
standards proposals are to be moved through the process or dropped.
There could be many reasons for this particular failure. It could be the
IETF is understaffed, it could be the IETF is simply poorly organized, or
it could be something else. But it is in our mutual interest to find out,
and correct the problem.
--Dean
On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
Maybe this would be a good time to explain what the IETF needs a 9.33
person secretariat for, and why the secretariat must be entirely funded
by meeting fees.
Y'know, IETFers always have fun comparing the size of our secretariat
to those from other standards organizations. The phrase "order of
magnitude smaller" comes to mind.
The Secretariat handles I-D processing, meeting planning, IESG
telechats, software development and systems administration to support all
that, and much, much more.
As for the network: Vienna has shown that it's possible to do better.
There were at least two major external items that were different this
time: nasty, aggressive worms, both inside and outside -- *why* should
anyone clueful enough to attend an IETF meeting not know how to run AV
software, at the very least! -- and "helpful" operating systems that
think that going into IBSS mode when they don't hear a base station is
"user-friendly".
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb