RASP Agenda (IETF 118) 15.30 - 15.45: Chairs, welcome and agenda 15.45 - 16.00: Carolina Caeiro (onsite), Internet Standards Tracker 16.00 - 16.15: Sebastian Benthall (remote), Bigbang update 16.15 - 16.30: Susan Hares (on site), Consensus decision-making in the IESG 16.30 - 16.45: Matthew Russell Barnes (on site), Communication Patterns in the IETF. 16.45 - 17.00: Nick Merrill (on site), CDNs and States. ----------------------------------------- Abstract and bios: 1- Carolina Caeiro (onsite), Internet Standards Tracker Title: Internet Standards Tracker The goal of the Internet Standards Observatory is to prevent Internet fragmentation. The observatory is working on the development tools and resources to understand what Internet standards proposals are currently under discussion that could potentially challenge interoperability and significantly transform addressing, naming, networking and routing on the Internet. During the session, we will present our Standards Tracker for the ITU-T. The tracker has been developed using the Data Analytics Platform of the DNS Research Federation. Presenters will explain how the tracker works, how it was developed and how we process information on our platform. Presenters will discuss ongoing efforts to launch an IETF Standards Tracker, and briefly introduce forthcoming research supported by the Internet Standards Observatory. Presenters Carolina Caeiro, Senior Internet Policy and Governance Specialist at Oxford Information Labs and the DNS Research Federation. She has worked on Internet and technology governance for over 10 years across civil society and the technical community. Nathan Alan is Director of Technology Oxford Information Labs and the DNS Research Federation. He is one of the lead architects behind the Standards Tracker and the DNSRF's Data Analytics Platform. 2- Sebastian Benthall (remote), Bigbang update Abstract: Sebastian Benthall will provide a brief update on BigBang progress. Version 0.5 has been released with the contributions from the IETF 116 Hackathon. New scripts that assess the dominance of actors in working group leadership, draft authorship, and mailing lists are being built and refined. We anticipate adding more W3C data ingress features by the end of the calendar year. Bio: Sebastian Benthall is a Core Developer of BigBang. He is a Senior Research Fellow at New York University School of Law and a Research Scientist at the International Computer Science Institute 3- Susan Hares (onsite), Consensus decision-making in the IESG Abstract: RFC 2026 specifies that IETF RFC publication has the following steps: 1) Internet-Draft (I-D) creation, 2) WG requests publication of an I-D as RFC, 3) IESG review and approval of I-D as RFC, and 4) publication of the RFC by the RFC editor. Few studies have examined the effectiveness of the IESG as a group that reviews and approves RFCs. The IESG operates as a virtual top-management team (TMT) process that can be effective or ineffective based on group behaviors within the IESG. This longitudinal mixed-mode study examined whether solidarity and conflict were group behaviors that predicted effective team consensus decision-making in the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). This research examined the IESG consensus decision-making in the 28 years of consensus decision-making (1989-2016) from five different viewpoints (three different types of historical data and two surveys). Historiometric best practices guided the design of collection and IPA analysis of the historical data so that historical data could be triangulated with two surveys. Survey questions from Koster and Sanders' (2006) research on solidarity, Jehn’s Intragroup Conflict Scale (1995), and MacKenzie, Podsakoff, and Fetter's (1991) research on OCB were used as a basis for IPA analysis and the survey. The IPA analysis examined 3,458 group consensus decisions for group behaviors, with over 39,186 individual behavioral patterns with components of conflict, solidarity, or OCB. The researcher surveyed all IESG members from 1989-2016 in two surveys (given in 2013 and 2017). This research concludes that solidarity was an antecedent to effective team consensus decision-making in the IESG, but that conflict has a complex relationship to effective consensus decision-making in the IESG. Increases in solidarity behaviors in the TMT might increase the effectiveness of consensus decisions in team consensus decision-making. Key takeaways: 1. IESG effectiveness in making decisions can be predicted by solidarity, 2. Triangulation of a quantity of quality data is crucial to understanding the IESG process, 3. Conflict in IESG is complex due to the need for task conflict to create standards and negative public opinion on relationship conflict in IESG and IETF public meetings. Therefore, relationship conflict is driven into the undercurrents of the IESG TMT. Bio: Susan Hares has participated in the IETF since 1987. Susan is a co-author of BGP and 16 other key RFCs. She has been a co-chair of IDR for over 20 years. IDR is one of the most prolific WGs in the routing area. 3- Matthew Russell Barnes (on site), Communication Patterns in the IETF. Abstract: An important concept in organisational behaviour is how hierarchy affects the voice of individuals, whereby members of a given organisation exhibit differing power relations based on their hierarchical position. This presentation develops large-scale computational techniques utilising temporal network analysis to measure the effect that organisational hierarchy has on communication patterns throughout the IETF, focusing on the structure of pairwise interactions between individuals. A particularly useful feature of the IETF is a transparent hierarchy, where participants take on explicit roles (e.g., Area Directors, Working Group Chairs), and because its processes are open we have visibility into the communication of people at different hierarchy levels over a long time period. Exploiting this, we utilise a temporal network dataset of 989,911 email interactions among 23,741 participants to study how hierarchy impacts communication patterns. We show that the middle levels of the IETF are growing in terms of their dominance in communications. Higher levels consistently experience a higher proportion of incoming communication than lower levels, with higher levels initiating more communications too. We find that, overall, communication tends to flow ``up" the hierarchy more than ``down”. Finally, we find that communication with higher-levels is associated with future communication more than for lower-levels, which we interpret as ``facilitation”. We conclude by discussing the implications this has on patterns within the wider IETF. Bio: Matthew Russel is a third year PhD student at Queen Mary University of London specialising in analysis of complex networks of any kind. His undergraduate and masters level degrees were from University College London and my specialisation was computational quantum mechanics. He also spent 3 years in the commercial software development world, mostly building webapps for managing inventory data. 4- Nick Merrill (on site), CDNs and States. Abstract: What is the relationship between CDNs and state interests? Large CDNs intermediate most of internet traffic, yet how states view these infrastructures (and vice versa) is understudied. This talk lays out a few lines of initial questioning, particularly the role of internet fragmentation in creating varying levels of dependence upon commercial CDN providers. As moves toward internet sovereignty make some countries less dependent on CDNs than others, asymmetries emerge, in which countries with a strategic focus on internet sovereignty may face fewer consequences during CDN outages than the (largely Western) countries that rely more heavily on those providers. Could this asymmetry make CDNs a target of state-backed cyberattacks during a global conflict? I conclude by discussing this hypothetical, surveying the best available evidence from standards bodies and beyond about operational and other security practices at CDNs. Bio: Nick Merrill directs the Internet Atlas project at the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. He blends design research, qualitative and quantitative methods to understand how corporate and state power tangle in technical infrastructures like the Internet and how that tangling circumscribes lives for people to live. Nick has published over a dozen peer-reviewed articles in venues like CHI, CSCW, and Duke Law Review.