Apologies to those who are already tired of this debate, and those think
that we have enough of a clear idea of what the IETF mission is, and that
discussing more is harmful to the community, but....
I attempted to incorporate the latest discussions into an internet-draft,
which I managed to get out just before the deadline....
draft-alvestrand-ietf-mission-00.txt
The core of the draft:
The goal of the IETF is to make the Internet work.
The mission of the IETF is to produce high quality, relevant
technical and engineering documents that influence the way people
design, use and manage the Internet in such a way as to make the
Internet work better.
These documents include protocol standards, best current practices
and informational documents of various kinds.
The IETF will pursue this mission in adherence to the following
cardinal principles:
Open process - that any interested participant can in fact
participate in the work, know what is being decided, and make his
or her voice heard on the issue. Part of this principle is our
commitment to making our documents, our WG mailing lists, our
attendance lists and our meeting minutes publicly available on the
Net.
Technical competence - that the issues on which the IETF produces its
documents are issues where the IETF has the competence needed to
speak to them, and that the IETF is willing to listen to
technically competent input from any source.
Technical competence also means that we expect IETF output to be
designed to sound network engineering principles - this is also
often referred to as "engineering quality".
Volunteer Core - that our members and our leadership are people who
come to the IETF because they want to work for the IETF's
purposes.
Rough consensus and running code - We make standards based on the
combined engineering judgement of our participants and our real-
world experience in implementing and deploying our specifications.
The rest of the document is trying to define the terms and explain the
issues faced in formulating the mission statement.
An appendix (to be deleted before publication) lists some other attempts at
formulating a mission statement - the purpose of including this is to give
honor to those who worked on them, and to allow those who debate the issue
to see what other attempts to formulate the mission could look like.
Comments are welcome, of course!
Harald