Network Working Group H. Alvestrand
Internet-Draft Cisco Systems
Expires: August 8, 2004 February 8, 2004
A mission statement for the IETF
draft-alvestrand-ietf-mission-00
Status of this Memo
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This Internet-Draft will expire on August 8, 2004.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2004). All Rights Reserved.
Abstract
This memo gives a mission statement for the IETF, tries to define the
terms used in the statement sufficiently to make the mission
statement understandable and useful, argues why the IETF needs a
mission statement, and tries to capture some of the debate that led
to this point.
The appendix giving the debate is intended to be deleted when the RFC
is published; it is only given here as a reference and a thank-you
note.
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1. Mission statement
The goal of the IETF is to make the Internet work.
The mission of the IETF is to produce high quality, relevant
technical and engineering documents that influence the way people
design, use and manage the Internet in such a way as to make the
Internet work better.
These documents include protocol standards, best current practices
and informational documents of various kinds.
The IETF will pursue this mission in adherence to the following
cardinal principles:
Open process - that any interested participant can in fact
participate in the work, know what is being decided, and make his
or her voice heard on the issue. Part of this principle is our
commitment to making our documents, our WG mailing lists, our
attendance lists and our meeting minutes publicly available on the
Net.
Technical competence - that the issues on which the IETF produces its
documents are issues where the IETF has the competence needed to
speak to them, and that the IETF is willing to listen to
technically competent input from any source.
Technical competence also means that we expect IETF output to be
designed to sound network engineering principles - this is also
often referred to as "engineering quality".
Volunteer Core - that our members and our leadership are people who
come to the IETF because they want to work for the IETF's
purposes.
Rough consensus and running code - We make standards based on the
combined engineering judgement of our participants and our real-
world experience in implementing and deploying our specifications.
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2. Definition of terms
Misson: What an organization sets out to do. This is in contrast to
its goal (which is what it hopes to achieve by fulfilling its
mission), and to its activities (which is what specific actions it
takes to achieve its mission).
The Internet: A large, heterogenous collection of interconnected
systems that can be used for communication of many different types
between any interested parties connected to it. The term includes
both the "core Internet" (ISP networks) and "edge Internet"
(corporate and private networks).
The IETF community wants the Internet to succeed because we
believe that the existence of the Internet, and its influence on
economics, communication and education, will help us to build a
better human society.
Standard: As used here, the term describes a specification of a
protocol, system behaviour or procedure that has an unique
identifier, and where the IETF has agreed that "if you want to do
this thing, this is the description of how to do it". It does not
imply any attempt by the IETF to mandate its use, or any attempt
to police its usage - only that "if you say that you are doing
this according to this standard, do it this way".
The benefit of a standard to the Internet is in interoperability -
that multiple products implementing a standard are able to work
together in order to deliver valuable functions to the Internet's
users.
Participants: The fundamental unit of the IETF organization and the
IETF's work. The IETF has found that the process works best when
focused around people, rather than around organizations,
companies, governments or interest groups. That is not to say
that these other entities are uninteresting - but they are not
what constitutes the IETF.
Quality: In this context, the ability to express ideas with enough
clarity that they can be understood in the same way by all people
building systems to conform to them, and the ability (and
willingness) to describe the properties of the system well enough
to understand important consequences of its design, and to ensure
that those consequences are beneficial to the Internet as a whole.
It also means that the specifications are designed with adherence
to sound network engineering principles, so that use for its
intended purpose is likely to be effective and not harmful to the
Internet as a whole.
Relevant: In this context, useful to some group of people who have to
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make decisions that affect the Internet, including, but not
limited to, hardware and software implementors, network builders,
network operators and users of the Internet. Note that it does
not mean "correct" or "positive" - a report of an experiment that
failed, or a specification that clearly says why you should not
use it in a given situation, can be highly relevant - for deciding
what NOT to do.
A part of being relevant is being timely - very often, documents
delivered a year after core decisions have been taken are far less
useful than documents that are available to the decision-makers at
decision time.
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3. The need for a mission statement
The IETF has to make decisions. And in some cases, people acting on
behalf of the IETF have to make decisions without consulting the
entire IETF first.
There are many reasons for this, including the near-impossibility of
getting an informed consensus opinion on a complex subject out of a
community of several thousand people in reasonable time.
Having a defined mission is one of the steps we can take in order to
evaluate alternatives: Does this help or hinder the mission, or is it
orthogonal to it? If there are limited resources, are there things
that they could be invested in that help the mission better? (Another
step is to choose leaders that we trust to exercise their good
judgment and do the right thing. But we're already trying to do
that.)
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4. Issues with scoping the IETF's mission
4.1 The scope of the Internet
A very difficult issue in discussing the IETF's mission has been the
scope of the term "for the Internet". The Internet is used for many
things, many of which the IETF community has neither interest nor
competence in making standards for.
The Internet isn't value-neutral, and neither is the IETF. We want
the Internet to be useful for communities that share our commitment
to openness and fairness. We embrace technical concepts such as
decentralized control, edge-user empowerment and sharing of
resources, because those concepts resonate with the core values of
the IETF community. These concepts have little to do with the
technology that's possible, and much to do with the technology that
we choose to create.
At the same time, it is clear that many of the IETF-defined
technologies are useful not only for the Internet, but also for
networks that have no direct relation to the Internet itself.
In attempting to resolve this question, perhaps the fairest balance
is struck by this formulation: "protocols and practices for which
secure and scalable implementations are expected to have wide
deployment and interoperation on the Internet, or to form part of the
infrastructure of the Internet."
In addition to this constraint, we are also constrained by the
principle of competence: Where we do not have, and cannot gather, the
competence needed to make technically sound standards, we should not
attempt to take the leadership.
4.2 The balance between research, invention and adoption
The IETF has traditionally been a community for both experimentation
with things that are not fully understood, standardization of
protocols for which some understanding has been reached, and
publication of (and refinement of) protocols originally specified
outside the IETF process.
All of these activities have in common that they produce documents -
but the documents should be judged to very different criteria when
the time to publish comes around, and it's not uncommon to see people
confused about what documents are in which category.
In deciding whether or not these activities should be done within the
IETF, one should not chiefly look at the type of activity, but the
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potential benefit to the Internet - an experiment that yields
information about the fact that an approach is not viable might be as
worthy of publication as a standard that is technically competent,
but only useful in a few special cases.
For research of an essentially unbounded nature, with unknown
probability of success, it may be more relevant to charter a research
group than a standards group. For activities with a bounded scope -
such as specifying several alternative protocols to the point where
experiments can identify the better one for standardization - the
IETF's working group mechanism may be an appropriate tool.
4.3 The balance between mission and procedures
The mission is intended to state what the IETF is trying to achieve.
There are many methods that can be chosen to achieve these outcomes -
for instance, the appeals procedure is defined so that we can detect
cases where our fundamental principles of technical competence and
open process has been violated; it is not itself a fundamental value.
Similarly, the question of what body in the IETF declares that a
document is ready for publication is entirely outside the mission
statement; we can imagine changing that without in any way impacting
what the IETF mission is - even though it may significantly impact
the ability to achieve that mission.
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5. Security considerations
Considering security is one of the core principles of sound network
engineering for the Internet. Apart from that, it's not relevant to
this memo.
Author's Address
Harald Tveit Alvestrand
Cisco Systems
Weidemanns vei 27
Trondheim 7043
NO
EMail: harald@alvestrand.no
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Appendix A. From the debate: Other mission statements proposed
This appendix is intended to be removed when (if) this document is
published as an RFC. It is intended to aid the memory of those
engaging in discussion about it, and avoid repetition of previous
discussion and proposals of alternatives. These other mission
statements have formed a critical part of the process leading to the
current proposal, and thanks should be extended to their formulators.
A.1 The Tao of IETF
RFC 3160, the Tao of IETF (latest version) says (section 1):
The Internet Engineering Task Force is a loosely self-organized group
of people who contribute to the engineering and evolution of Internet
technologies. It is the principal body engaged in the development of
new Internet standard specifications. The IETF is unusual in that it
exists as a collection of happenings, but is not a corporation and
has no board of directors, no members, and no dues.
Its mission includes:
Identifying, and proposing solutions to, pressing operational and
technical problems in the Internet;
Specifying the development or usage of protocols and the near-term
architecture to solve such technical problems for the Internet;
Making recommendations to the Internet Engineering Steering Group
(IESG) regarding the standardization of protocols and protocol
usage in the Internet;
Facilitating technology transfer from the Internet Research Task
Force (IRTF) to the wider Internet community; and
Providing a forum for the exchange of information within the
Internet community between vendors, users, researchers, agency
contractors, and network managers.
The IETF meeting is not a conference, although there are technical
presentations. The IETF is not a traditional standards organization,
although many specifications are produced that become standards. The
IETF is made up of volunteers, many of whom meet three times a year
to fulfill the IETF mission.
There is no membership in the IETF. Anyone may register for and
attend any meeting. The closest thing there is to being an IETF
member is being on the IETF or Working Group mailing lists (see
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Section 1.3). This is where the best information about current IETF
activities and focus can be found.
Of course, no organization can be as successful as the IETF is
without having some sort of structure. In the IETF's case, that
structure is provided by other organizations, as described in BCP 11,
"The Organizations Involved in the IETF Standards Process." If you
participate in the IETF and only read one BCP, this is the one you
should read.
Commentary: This is a long section. It also is quite unclear in the
scope of the term "IETF". And it does not provide any hint of which
goals are primary and which are secondary. But it does describe
quite accurately many aspects of the current IETF.
A.2 Harald Alvestrand from the London IESG
The purpose of the IETF is to create high quality, relevant standards
for the Internet
Commentary: This was formulated at an IESG meeting held in
conjunction with the IETF meeting. There is more text explaining
more background - see http://www.alvestrand.no/ietf/iesg/purpose.php
A.3 Ted Hardie to the IESG
The IETF is a community of active participants dedicated to producing
timely, high quality engineering work that describes protocols and
practices for which secure and scalable implementations are expected
to have wide deployment and interoperation on or to form part of the
infrastructure of the Internet.
Commentary: This came out of a meeting of a small group that was
convened by the IETF Chair in September 2003 to do a brainstorm on
what we could do to "make the IETF work better".
A.4 IESG November
The IETF's mission has historically been embedded in a shared
understanding that making engineering choices based on the long term
interest of the Internet as a whole produces better long-term results
for each participant than making choices based on short term
considerations, because the value of those advantages is ultimately
derived from the health of the whole. The long term interest of the
Internet includes the premise that "the Internet is for everyone".
Two years ago, the IESG felt that making the mission of the IETF more
explicit was needed. The following terse statement has since been
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promulgated, first by IESG members and then by others:
"The purpose of the IETF is to create high quality, relevant, and
timely standards for the Internet."
Note that this clearly positions the IETF primarily as a standards
development organization. There are other activities in the IETF;
but if the IETF does not do its core mission, all else will quickly
fade. This is intended to be an ordered list of characteristics.
Timely standards of low quality or that are irrelevant will not serve
the Internet's or the IETF's needs.
This leaves open the very interesting and difficult questions of how
to measure quality, relevance, and timeliness. The IETF has
identified interoperability, security, and scalability as essential,
but without attaching measurements to those characteristics.
It is important that this is "For the Internet," and does not
include everything that happens to use IP. IP is being used in a
myriad of real-world applications, such as controlling street lights,
but the IETF does not standardize those applications.
Commentary: This was part of an "IETF social contract" proposed by
the IESG to the IETF list on October 14, 2003. It engendered quite a
bit of discussion, with perhaps the most heated part being the
definition of "For the Internet".
A.5 Fred Baker
The Internet Engineering Task Force provides a forum for the
discussion and development of white papers and specifications for the
engineering issues of the Internet.
This discussion builds on hard lessons learned in research and
operational environments, and necessarily includes speakers from
those communities. Vendors offer wisdom on what can be built and
made to work in their products, and may bring customer or market
issues whose owners cannot or will not bring themselves.
The intended goal is well characterized as 'community memory' -
written observations and wisdom as well as protocols and operational
procedures defined - to enable the datagram internet to scalably
deliver relevant services in transit and edge networks."
This was sent to the IETF list as part of a discussion on the IETF
mission on Jan 29, 2004.
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A.6 Dean Anderson
IETF is a technical protocol standards organization. Its principal
goals are:
To create open, technical standards that will be useful to and
adopted by the world internet communtity and the public at large.
To identify current and emerging protocol requirements, and share
best practices.
To facliitate the participation of all affected and interested
parties and develop consensus.
To solicit the input of a diverse group of interests and
participants in the formation of protocol standards.
To provide a fair and open process whereby any party that believes
it has been treated unfairly has the right to appeal.
To work with suppliers, consortia, and other standards bodies to
develop consensus and facilitate interoperability.
Comment: Sent to the IETF list on February 4, 2004. Had some
discussion on the "appeal" point - whether "party" was persons or
companies, and whether appeals belonged in a mission statement.
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