I'm not sure how useful it is to compare today's situation with the
pre-Kobe days. A lot of circumstances have changed since then. In
particular, IETF is slightly larger and much more diverse, its
audience is much larger and more diverse, the target environment is
several orders of magnitude larger and considerably more diverse, and
the set of threats to applications and the network has also grown
considerably. Internet protocols are subject to much more pressure of
every kind these days than they were then. Engineering for today's
environment is considerably more difficult than it was 10+ years ago,
and even if we considered our way of managing the process good back
then (which is debatable) it's not clear that it would serve us well
now.
Actually I think our biggest problems stem from a deeply entrenched
institutional culture that believes that endless unstructured
discussion among a group of self-selected narrowly focused
participants, without significant external supervision, and typically
without any of the other steps associated with other disciplines of
engineering, is a good way to do protocol design. To the extent it
worked in the pre-Kobe days, it might have been more because of
favorable circumstances than because of the superiority of that way of
doing things:
- the Internet was small and relatively uniform and easy to understand;
- the IETF was small, with less turnover, and most of us knew each
other;
- if you were talented and wanted to do Internet work, IETF
participation was almost a no-brainer - the barriers to entry
(financial and otherwise) were low and the working atmosphere was
friendly;
- working groups were fewer and focused on less ambitious tasks;
- there was far less time-to-market pressure;
- the target environment was much less demanding and hostile, making
the design job much easier;
- there was less pressure to bend/subvert the architecture; and
- there were a lot more academics and generalists involved in IETF who
were naturally inclined to think about cross-area issues.
All of this discussion reminds me of the Nasrudin story where he's
looking for his keys on the ground outside his house, because the light
was better there, even though they were inside his house when he last
saw them. People keep focusing on IESG when the biggest problems are
at the WG level.
Keith
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