--On Wednesday, May 29, 2013 18:20 +0300 Jari Arkko
<jari(_dot_)arkko(_at_)piuha(_dot_)net> wrote:
There seems to be a general pattern where new participants
first participate and/or produce IDs but it takes some time to
produce RFCs. For instance, for a while it was the case that
there was a growing number of proposals and participants from
China, but it is only more recently that the RFC statistics
reflect this (see the bright green line in
http://www.arkko.com/tools/rfcstats/countrydistrhist.html).
The hypothesis is that first of all, it takes a while to
produce RFCs :-) and that new participants take a while before
they get up to speed on the process, find enough other parties
that share similar needs for the specific technical work, etc.
I would add to that list the observation that, when complete
newcomers come to the IETF in order to propose some pet idea or
personal invention and get it standardized, the first I-Ds that
they submit often don't go anywhere because they propose a
networking model that is outside IETF scope, have serious
technical flaws the authors did not identify, just are not of
interest to other members of the community, or are generally off
the wall for some other reason (such as requiring changes to
laws of physics or axiomatic definitions of mathematics).
Certainly not every proposal with which a newcomer arrives falls
into those categories -- some have been useful -- but it is
important to remember that there are substantive reasons why
I-Ds submitted within the first months of someone's
participation often have a lower acceptance rate as RFCs than
ones that come from more experienced participants.
I think there are important questions as to whether we handle
such proposals in a way that maximizes the odds of future
participation by those individuals and suspect we could do
better in that area. But those are separate issues.
john