IETF Community Survey 2024

(UPDATE: The initial version of the report published with this blog post, dated 22 May 2025 included incorrect charts for Q4 Gender, Q6 Employment and Q6a Sector. The latest version, dated 28 May 2025, includes corrected charts).

In December 2024 the fourth annual IETF community survey was distributed to all ~53,000 addresses subscribed to IETF mailing lists.   This survey aims to deliver three outcomes:

• A current size and demographic breakdown of the IETF community.
• Data to inform the IETF community, particularly those in leadership roles, on what are some of the key issues affecting the IETF and why sometimes asserted issues are not actually issues.
• A step in a time series of data that can be used to assess the natural changes affecting the IETF and the effectiveness of major programs, organisational changes and community/leadership actions.

A draft report was published for consultation in late April 2025 and minor changes made following feedback received, leading to today's publication of the final report.

A special thanks to the 1400+ people who responded to this survey, providing a rich data set.

The key findings section of the report is reproduced below:

Key Findings

This is inevitably an imperfect survey as the respondents are self-selected and the IETF has many more people subscribed to its mailing lists than are active in any one year.  However, this is now the fourth year for this survey and some consistent results can be seen across the years.

1. The IETF is successfully delivering the goals and principles it sets itself in its mission statement

As clearly shown in Q25 and Q30, IETF participants rate the output of the IETF highly across the key areas of quality and relevance, for having been produced in an open way, and for meeting community consensus.  This strongly matches the IETF Mission Statement (RFC 3935):

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. 

As well as matching some of the cardinal principles set out in the same RFC:

• Open process 
• Technical competence ("engineering quality")
• Volunteer Core
• Rough consensus and running code

2. The single biggest process issue in the IETF is the time cost in getting things done, both at the personal and organizational levels

At the personal level, Q26a reports the time to read emails and documents as the single biggest hindrance to participation, while Q27a has a relatively low score for WGs being a good use of time.  

At the organizational level, Q25 identifies the time to produce RFCs as a problem.  This is supported by the views of the speed of the standards process compared to other organizations in Q30, which is still better but not by much.  In Q27 the statement that WG decisions take a reasonable amount of time has one of the lowest scores of support.

3. The IETF still has a low level of participation by women, particularly among regular participants, and they report a different experience from men

Q2, Q3 and Q4 tell us that the IETF is still predominantly older men from Europe and North America with women a very small percentage of participants.

Women report in Q26 a worse experience than men when asked if they are treated the same as the rest of the IETF, have good opportunity to share their views and feel part of the IETF community.  In other aspects, such as understanding of processes or treatment within WGs, no difference is reported.

4. The demographics and participation preferences of new participants are quite different from those of existing regular participants

Q2, Q3 and Q4 tell us that new participants have a notably different composition by age and gender from other participants, and a small difference by region.

There are a number of questions where there is a pronounced spread of rating by age:  Q26a for being hindered by the reliance on mailing lists, Q22 for a preference for hearing about the IETF in blog posts and social media posts, and Q24 for almost all non-email forms of participation.

5. Regular participation is necessary to get the most from the IETF and that takes a lot of effort

The IETF is, by design, a participative organization not a consultative one and so, perhaps unsurprisingly, regular participants get far more out of it.  Q12 shows that regular participants are more strongly and more broadly motivated, in Q26 and Q27a they rate personal experience higher than others who participate less and in Q27 their rating of how they are valued than the self-rating of others.

As shown in Q1a there is a strong correlation between regular participation and meeting participation. Q26 also scores personal experience higher for those who have participated in an IETF meeting.

However, the downside as shown in Q13, is that regular participants spend a median of 9 hours per week on IETF activities compared to just 2 hours for those who only monitor/read IETF mailing lists.

6. Currently, it takes many years to learn IETF processes and they are generally considered very complex and not as effective as they could be

In Q25 participants rate the effectiveness of IETF processes as only acceptable and in Q26 give a similar score for their understanding of IETF processes.  Q26a identifies the complexity of IETF processes as a moderate hindrance to participation.

Q26 provides a useful insight that the longer someone has been participating in the IETF the better their understanding, suggesting that these processes need to be learnt by experience not other methods, and that it takes 15-20 years of participation for someone to feel they have a good understanding of processes.

7. Poor participant behaviour, while not something to be ignored, is not a major issue

In Q27a participants give a good score for the behaviour of other WG participants, in Q27 they give acceptable/good scores for how well the behaviour of WG participants is managed and how well disagreements are resolved. Q18 puts the culture of the IETF as a very minor reason for people ceasing to participate in the IETF.

However, at the IETF level in Q26a the behaviour of other participants is only scored at acceptable and in Q30 participants only rate the IETF slightly higher than other SDOs for the behaviour of participants.