Vidya brings up some interesting points, some of it IETF-related but also some
that relates how the world is evolving. For instance, the open source trend.
But to pick another trend, so many things can now be built without any
permission from anyone - including SDOs. We call this permissionless
innovation, and it is a good thing. The Internet has grown, and it is not our
task at the IETF to do everything, we should, however, care about evolving the
core protocols.
One of Vidya's examples was the Internet of Things, and she wondered how little
standards work is needed. But that is not an accident, it is by design. From my
perspective what happened was that link layer technology developed to make the
physical level connectivity possible and existing Internet protocols were
sufficient to do 98% of what was needed. As an example, I see most of Internet
of Things gadgets running on the web protocol stack. Because it just works, it
is widely available, goes through every firewall, and so on. These are good
things. As a consequence, places like IETF or IEEE are not developing thousands
of applications for the Internet of Things, the vendors are. The union of the
meter manufacturers are. And so on. There is still some core standards
development necessary - as witnessed at the IETF in the form of mesh routing
protocol work, various IPv6 over Foo working groups, the 6LO* working groups,
the lightweight web/security protocol working groups, and !
so on. Fundamental and necessary efforts, but in numbers 1000x less than
efforts higher up.
The IETF has its place, but it is more about being useful to the open source
efforts, the permissionless innovators, and the like than trying to compete
with them. How can we do this best? One avenue is working on tools that the
permissionless innovation, SDN, virtualisation, IOT, and web development
revolutions need underneath. We have active developments at the IETF on all of
those fronts, and I suspect more is coming.
There are certainly also IETF process/organisation things that we should work
on to improve. We do. Here are some things that I would like to see:
o Are there ways to work to mutual benefit with open source efforts (those
that would benefit from an IETF-like environment)?
o Recognising that many successful cases of Internet technology development
have been about some people somewhere making something that later required
standards at which point the IETF took over. Learning to do this, and learning
to do it well is important.
o How can we better build specs to (rough) consensus, including making sure
that (an understood) vocal minority opinion does not block progress?
o More focus on running code.
(All my personal opinions, of course.)
Jari