Tim,
was surprised to see a total of 15 proposed BoFs
That is a relatively big number. There is a very high attrition rate, however.
That people are coming to the IETF with proposals to do work is probably a
healthy thing; it would be more worrying if there were no BoFs proposed.
Indeed! More is better.
But if all the proposals are accepted, and they all lead to WGs being formed,
that's a lot of new groups to be created, scheduled and supported.
The crux is getting good enough proposals that they actually deserve a BoF slot
and eventually lead to a working group. As noted, many proposals do not even
make the first cut.
In contrast, how many WGs have been closed in the past few months? I see
there's http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/concluded from which I can see there
are 10 WGs listed there which seem to have closed this year:
iri 2013-01-19
imapmove 2013-01-31
csi 2013-02-12
sipclf 2013-02-20
bliss 2013-02-27
simple 2013-02-27
fecframe 2013-03-06
krb-wg 2013-03-19
eai 2013-03-19
6tch 2013-04-19
I wonder how the volume and lifetimes of WGs has changed over the years, e.g.
the number we have, how quickly they complete their work, etc. Has anyone
been looking at this?
We don't have a very good picture of that. My perception is that many of our
working groups generally live quite long. That's fine when they are chartered
to, e.g., maintain an important spec. But for new feature work, a faster
turnaround rate might be preferable. Come in, do the work, close the working
group, create a new working group for the next thing, etc. But for a good
picture of the WG lifetimes, one would also have to look at rechartering.
I also think that the number of working groups at the IETF has been relatively
stable over the years. There are also obvious limiting factors, like the number
of slots in our meetings, for working groups that meet.
Jari