IETF 90 BoFs
For every IETF meeting, the steering group receives a number of proposals for new work. Not all new work in the IETF has to go through a public meeting to be accepted.
Last week, I visited the ICANN50 meeting in London. The meeting was held at a location well known to us at the IETF – the Hilton London Metropole.
The meeting drew a record 3100 attendees on site, ranging from governments to businesses, civil society, and technical community. The hot topic of the week was the transition of NTIA’s stewardship of the IANA functions to the global multi-stakeholder community. This topic was discussed at almost very meeting during the week.
On the last day of the meeting, Patrik Fältström and I moderated a session that focused on the transition. The NTIA made its announcement in March, and there has been a lot of discussion about how to go about the process in the months that followed. In late April, the IAB made a widely recognised contribution on the topic. In June, ICANN published an outline of the process that will be used for the transition, known as “the plan for the plan”. Among other things, the process calls for the establishment of a Coordination Group to assemble a proposal from components provided by respective communities. The final proposed plan should be delivered to the NTIA by September 2015.
Patrik and I believe that the real work in moving forward with planning IANA stewardship without NTIA should now begin. A big part of this work rests on the individual communities (e.g., IETF, RIRs, gTLD and ccTLD communities) that are the IANA functions customers. Our session discussed expectations both for the communities and the community’s expectations of the Coordination Group moving forward.
The session was organised as a set of invited introductory talks around a number of topics, followed by open discussion with the community. The introductory talks were given by members from various constituencies, Alissa Cooper from IETF, Heather Dryden from the Government Advisory Committee (GAC) of ICANN, Olaf Kolkman from NLnet Labs (for ISOC), and Marilia Maciel from At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) of ICANN. All introductory slides are available here and the transcript here.
Patrik and I talked about how IANA works and lessons learned so far in the three-month process. We also pointed out that the transition is not rocket science: for instance, we at the IETF are likely pretty close to what is required for the transition, with our agreements, role definitions, groups that track the relationship, and so on. Alissa talked about the role of the communities vs. the coordination group, which is an important topic for us at the IETF, as the IAB’s model for evolution of IANA is that the IETF can control its own destiny.
https://www.ietf.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/lessons.jpg
The session ended with with an hour of community discussion in the room and from multiple remote hubs. My summary of the input that we heard was as follows:
The room supported this summary. Interestingly, this support was measured with the first-ever ICANN consensus hum :-) (see RFC 7282).
Photo credits: Martin Levy and Olaf Kolkman
For every IETF meeting, the steering group receives a number of proposals for new work. Not all new work in the IETF has to go through a public meeting to be accepted.
New IETF work begins often as a proposed new working group, through something called a Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session.
During an IETF meeting, the IESG and IAB members are busy with what is going on in our areas, and we have little time to talk to each other. But we organise yearly retreats where we get to talk to each other, and can tackle issues beyond the usual daily ones.
The NETmundial meeting was held last week in São Paulo, Brazil. I wanted to provide a brief report of my view of the meeting and its outcome.
There is an ongoing period for commenting an early draft process description that was released by ICANN. The IAB has now submitted a detailed process proposal that refines the draft process, and suggests that much of the work should be done in the communities that care about the particular name or number spaces (such as IETF in the case of protocol parameters).
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