Notes from plenary on 2005-11-09 by Mirjam Kuehne.
Brian Carpenter, the Chair of the IETF, opened the plenary by
reminding everybody that we are approaching the 20th anniversary of
the IETF. In January 1986 the first IETF meeting was held in San
Diego, US, with 21 attendees.
Now, almost 20 years later, there were 1291 attendees from 40 countries. It
is interesting to note that exactly one year ago 1309 people from only
26 countries attended the IETF in Washington DC, i.e. a similar number
but from fewer countries.
====
Ed Juskevicius, representing Nortel, the host of this IETF, gave some
insight into the tasks and challenges of an IETF host. They range from
finding a suitable venue, fulfilling extended network requirements all
the way to providing t-shirts and an exciting social event. Ed thanked
the many sponsors, advisors, volunteers and the NOC team.
====
Ray Pelletier, the IETF Administrative Director (IAD) presented the
IETF budget 2006. Noticable is the increase in budget for the RFC
editor provided by ISOC. By providing these additional resources, it
is expected to reduce the RFC editing backlog. The general increase in
costs will probably make it necessary to increase the IETF meeting fees
next year.
Ray further confirmed that Foretec, the organisation that
provided secretariat and meeting support to the IETF since 1998, has
been acquired by Neustar. A service contract between Neustar and the
IETF Administrative Support Activity (IASA) for taking on the
secretariat functions and the meeting organisation is under
negotiation.
In December, the IAD will visit RFC Editor and IANA for further
discussions on improving efficiency and integration with IETF
secretariat operations.
In 2007 a Request for Proposal (RFP) for the secretariat and meeting
support will be issued. An RFP for the RFC editor function will be
issued in 2006.
Another task high on the IAD's priority list is the structure and
consistency of the IETF web site.
====
Lucy Lynch, the chair of the IETF Administrative Oversight Committee
(IAOC), followed with an update on the IAOC activities. Recent
activities include negotiations of the terms of the IETF trust and
setting up a model license agreement for the trust assets. With
respect to the IETF trust, the IAOC reached substantial agreement with
CNRI and ISOC.
Right after the meeting the IAOC chair sent a call for consensus to
the IETF mailing list asking for community affirmation of the IETF
Trust document.
A list of frequently asked questions on trust matters
has been developed by the IAOC:
http://koi.uoregon.edu/~iaoc/docs/TrustFAQv1.1.txt
More information on the structure of ther IASA, the IAOC members,
minutes of IAOC meetings and more details about the IETF trust can be
found at
http://koi.uoregon.edu/~iaoc/
====
Joyce Reynolds, representing the RFC Editor, reported from recent
activities: Since the last IETF 105 documents (3000 pages) were
published. People are working hard to reduce the backlog and results
can be seen now. The RFC Editor collaborated on an experiment to
introduce editing earlier in the IETF process. The results have been
presented during the techspec BoF at this IETF. Joyce further
reported that normative references to unapproved documents have became a
major problem. Therefore the RFC Editor has decided not to work on a
document until those references have been resolved. The publication
queue is now automatically updated at
http://www.rfc-editor.org/queue.html
====
Barbara Roseman, operations manager of the Internet Assigned Numbers
Authority (IANA), gave an update of IANA's recent activities:
David R. Conrad joined the IANA as General Manager in October. IANA
has now 7 staff members. Most requests are now handled within 30
days. There are still a number of older requests though. Barbara
encouraged everyone who has a request pending that is older than 30
days to contact the IANA at .
The IANA will be working with the IESG to agree on time frames in
which to complete requests and will report back to the community on
the performance against those goals. With the new staffing level,
Barbara said she is confident that the IANA is in a position now to
address the full diversity of their responsibilities.
====
Allison Mankin, one of the team leaders of the Process and Tools
(PROTO) team, reported from about the work of the team. Operational
guidelines for WG chairs have been developed and many WG chairs are in
fact using them. Since the guidelines have been published about a year
ago, a lot of useful feedback has been received by the proto team.
During this IETF new tools have been used to allow WG chairs to upload
presentations and proceedings directly to the IETF web site.
The proto-team is encouraging all WG chairs to review and use the
guidelines (current version:
draft-ietf-proto-wgchair-doc-shepherding-05.txt) and to provide
feedback to
The proto team is further looking for 2 or 3 more energetic team
members.
More information about the proto team can currently be found at
http://mip4.org/proto/
A new web page directly linked from the IETF web site is under
development.
====
Finally Ralph Droms, the chair of the NomCom 2005, introduced this
year's Nominations Committee and encouraged people to provide
nominations for open IESG and IAB positions.
More information can be found at
http://www.ietf.org/nomcom/index.html
===
This set of presentations was followed by an open discussion where the
IESG were seated on stage and Fred Baker acted as independent moderator.
A number of different topics were raised. The first one was related to
individual submissions to the RFC Editor and how they could be handled
more efficiently. Bob Braden from the RFC Editor pointed out that it
is IETF policy that IETF documents take precedence and with the
current backlog, it is difficult to process individual submissions
faster. Some suggestions were made to either lower the level of review
for non standards documents or possibly create a label for documents
that would show the status of a document (e.g. reviewed by WGs, result
of review).
The next comments were addressed to the IAOC. Some people felt that there
is not enough transparency and that the community is not involved in
the decision making process early enough. Others disagreed and noted
that the IETF community has never been involved in any of the
administrative and financial decisions in the past, and that IASA was
formed exactly for this reason, and that the way the IASA
and the IAOC are working with the community is a great improvement.
Lucy Lynch, the IAOC chair, pointed out that all minutes and other IAOC
documents are published timely on the IAOC web site. Some decisions
involve negotiations with third parties and cannot be discussed in
the open, however.
During the discussion that followed, one participant made a suggestion
for a "cultural change": rather than generic complaints, only
concrete examples and suggestions about IASA and IAOC actions
should be encouraged. Others felt this would restrict the openness of
the discussion too much and people might hesitate to participate.
People expressed the opinion that it is important to have such
discussions during the plenary.
The last topic that was raised during this plenary session
was related to WG processes: It was noted that the
working methods of individual WGs can differ. This might affect their
technical choices significantly. And even though RFC 2418 makes it clear
that every WG can choose their method of working depending on the
amount and the type of work, this issue should not be underestimated
and might be a topic for the IAB and the IESG to look at.
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