Skip to main content
  • Extended Protocol Provisioning Tutorial from IETF 121

    The RESTful Provisioning Protocol (rpp) Birds of a Feather session during the IETF 121 meeting featured a review of the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) of interest to anyone looking to learn more about the Domain Name System (DNS).

    2 Dec 2024
  • IETF 121 post-meeting survey

    IETF 121 Dublin was held 2-8 November 2024 and the results of the post-meeting survey are now available on a web-based interactive dashboard.

    25 Nov 2024
  • The new GREEN working group gets ready for an energy efficient Internet

    The Getting Ready for Energy-Efficient Networking (GREEN) working group will explore use cases, derive requirements, and provide solutions to optimize energy efficiency across the Internet.

    29 Oct 2024
  • IETF Annual Report 2023

    The IETF Annual Report 2023 provides a summary of Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), and RFC Editor community activities from last year.

    25 Oct 2024
  • IETF 122 Bangkok registration open

    Registration is now available for the IETF 122 Bangkok meeting scheduled for 15-21 March 2025, which is the first time registration for an IETF meeting has been open before the preceding meeting registration has closed.

    25 Oct 2024

Filter by topic and date

Filter by topic and date

Balancing the Process

1 May 2013

One of the most rewarding parts of my job is talking to various IETF contributors or people who rely on our results, and trying to understand their experiences about the IETF process and what kinds of technical topics they expect us to tackle. This article focuses on the process aspects.

Number of Discusses per document 2004-2010
One piece of feedback that I consistently hear is that too much of the IETF process is centered on the later stages and in particular the IESG review.  Documents rarely sail through the IETF last call and IESG review unchanged. At least 90% of the documents get revised. Many of these fixes are editorial, but some have technical substance. It is surprising that documents that were expected to be ready as they left the working group need so much revision.

Having been involved in the process for many years, often the bigger changes at this stage relate to cross-area issues, or the fact that the careful reviews from the IETF last call, directorates, and 15 ADs often represents a significant increase in the number of non-WG people looking at the document.

While some of this is natural as the document gains more exposure, it is still painful. Often difficult tradeoffs get re-discussed at this stage, late surprises are discovered, and significant document changes occur. These drawbacks are amplified by our informal processes through which changes are introduced. While we try to keep the working groups in the loop, sometimes the discussion happens directly between authors and reviewers or ADs. The WGs are not always directly informed, and it is rare to conduct formal last calls.

All this results in uncertainty for the progress of documents through the IETF, increases the work load of the IESG, and makes the working groups not be as central to the standards process as they should be. And yet, based on my experience a vast majority of those changes were necessary before the RFCs got published.

But is there a way to improve our process on this aspect? We are discussing some of these issues in an IESG retreat that is coming up next week in Dublin, Ireland. Input on these topics would be valuable. Are these problems real? What suggested methods could be used to reduce their effects? Why are we not doing more cross-area reviewing (by ADs or otherwise) earlier in the process? Please send feedback directly to me or discuss at the mailing list.

P.S. In case you were wondering where the graph came from – it is from my IETF statistics page, but unfortunately the IESG measurement parts have not been working well in the last couple of years. I’m working on fixing them, but for this article I had to include an older statistic. Intuitively, current situation is similar to that in 2010.


Share this page