This mail is not about technology changes and trends
that we all work on. But I would like to get some help
understanding some of the non-technical changes
around the IETF, that affect how we should run our
operations. Changing participation, changing forms
of co-operation, changing landscapes in the area
of standards organisations, open source, and
so on.
This mail has been inspired by involvement in various
decisions that the IETF leadership has to take part in.
I find myself often wishing to be able to draw more
on the understanding trends and their impact on
the IETF.
I wanted to setup a short-term design team to
make a list (a memo) of these trends and
how they may be affecting the IETF.
Specifically, I am soliciting for additional person(s)
to help with this.
Having such a document would be useful when dealing
with various IETF related topics - be it about new
forms of working together like the Hackathon, new
people and new topics, ongoing industry transformations,
sponsorship - it is essential to have an understanding of
the trends around us, how they affect the IETF. I’d like
to make better decisions, and, ultimately, I think we all
in the community would like to form our general stance
towards various broader changes.
Some examples may help illustrate this.
The growth of the importance of open source in networking
technology is one example where I think we have common
recognition of the trend, and, I think, pretty strong agreement
in the IETF that we need to be a part of that, helping
open source world to work with the IETF where standards
are needed, seeing a world where standards and open
source support each other, and generally make it easier to
interact between different efforts.
Similarly, we were recently asked if we wanted to hold
an IETF Hackathon outside the IETF meetings. Timing
did not make it possible to even think about that opportunity,
but it opened up a broader question of what is the scope that
we are trying to achieve in our efforts. The world around us
uses Hackathon-type events a lot in many different contexts,
Is our target within an IETF meeting, in existing and new IETF
participants attending those meetings? Or is our goal broader,
such as additional engagement in the tech community
in using new technology coming out of IETF?
A third example is funding. We need to understand
what evolution we will see in our funding and sponsorship
model, amidst changing meeting participation style (such
as remote participation) or the increasingly professionally
run services that we host. Being able to understand where
we are headed is not just important for us. It is also important
when we communicate with our sponsors or with ISOC,
who funds a big part of our operations. There is a lot of
willingness to fund the IETF from all of these sources, I’m
happy to report! :-) But still, we need to tell our friends what
we want. And we need to have a long-term view of this.
The fourth example is perhaps borderline technical,
but does the focus on programmable (“software defined”)
technology somehow impact how we work at the IETF?
Some of the items on a list of changes may be obvious,
some not, but even for the obvious parts I have
found that writing down the commonly agreed
truths is useful in increasing our focus on dealing
with those truths. And some of the topics mentioned
above probably eventually deserve their own,
in-depth treatment in a thread or document of
their own. But as the first step, I would like to get to at
least identifying the trends that we need to talk about.
Please contact me in the next couple of days
if you are interested in helping on this topic!
Jari
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