A Mission Statement for the IETF

Network Working Group                                      H. Alvestrand
Request for Comments: 3935                                 Cisco Systems
BCP: 95                                                     October 2004
Category: Best Current Practice


                    A Mission Statement for the IETF

Status of this Memo

   This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the
   Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for
   improvements.  Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

Copyright Notice

   Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2004).

Abstract

   This memo gives a mission statement for the IETF, tries to define the
   terms used in the statement sufficiently to make the mission
   statement understandable and useful, argues why the IETF needs a
   mission statement, and tries to capture some of the debate that led
   to this point.

1. Mission Statement

   The goal of the IETF is to make the Internet work better.

   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.  These documents include protocol standards,
   best current practices, and informational documents of various kinds.

   The IETF will pursue this mission in adherence to the following
   cardinal principles:

   Open process - any interested person can participate in the work,
      know what is being decided, and make his or her voice heard on the
      issue.  Part of this principle is our commitment to making our
      documents, our WG mailing lists, our attendance lists, and our
      meeting minutes publicly available on the Internet.

   Technical competence - the issues on which the IETF produces its
      documents are issues where the IETF has the competence needed to
      speak to them, and that the IETF is willing to listen to
      technically competent input from any source.  Technical competence
      also means that we expect IETF output to be designed to sound
      network engineering principles - this is also often referred to as
      "engineering quality".

   Volunteer Core - our participants and our leadership are people who
      come to the IETF because they want to do work that furthers the
      IETF's mission of "making the Internet work better".

   Rough consensus and running code - We make standards based on the
      combined engineering judgement of our participants and our real-
      world experience in implementing and deploying our specifications.

   Protocol ownership - when the IETF takes ownership of a protocol or
      function, it accepts the responsibility for all aspects of the
      protocol, even though some aspects may rarely or never be seen on
      the Internet.  Conversely, when the IETF is not responsible for a
      protocol or function, it does not attempt to exert control over
      it, even though it may at times touch or affect the Internet.

2.  Definition of Terms

   Mission: What an organization sets out to do.  This is in contrast to
      its goal (which is what it hopes to achieve by fulfilling its
      mission), and to its activities (which is what specific actions it
      takes to achieve its mission).

   The Internet: A large, heterogeneous collection of interconnected
      systems that can be used for communication of many different types
      between any interested parties connected to it.  The term includes
      both the "core Internet" (ISP networks) and "edge Internet"
      (corporate and private networks, often connected via firewalls,
      NAT boxes, application layer gateways and similar devices).  The
      Internet is a truly global network, reaching into just about every
      country in the world.
      The IETF community wants the Internet to succeed because we
      believe that the existence of the Internet, and its influence on
      economics, communication, and education, will help us to build a
      better human society.

   Standard: As used here, the term describes a specification of a
      protocol, system behaviour or procedure that has a unique
      identifier, and where the IETF has agreed that "if you want to do
      this thing, this is the description of how to do it".  It does not
      imply any attempt by the IETF to mandate its use, or any attempt
      to police its usage - only that "if you say that you are doing
      this according to this standard, do it this way".  The benefit of
      a standard to the Internet is in interoperability - that multiple
      products implementing a standard are able to work together in
      order to deliver valuable functions to the Internet's users.

   Participants: Individuals who participate in the process are the
      fundamental unit of the IETF organization and the IETF's work.
      The IETF has found that the process works best when focused around
      people, rather than around organizations, companies, governments
      or interest groups.  That is not to say that these other entities
      are uninteresting - but they are not what constitutes the IETF.

   Quality: In this context, the ability to express ideas with enough
      clarity that they can be understood in the same way by all people
      building systems to conform to them, and the ability (and
      willingness) to describe the properties of the system well enough
      to understand important consequences of its design, and to ensure
      that those consequences are beneficial to the Internet as a whole.
      It also means that the specifications are designed with adherence
      to sound network engineering principles, so that use for its
      intended purpose is likely to be effective and not harmful to the
      Internet as a whole.

   Relevant: In this context, useful to some group of people who have to
      make decisions that affect the Internet, including, but not
      limited to, hardware and software implementors, network builders,
      network operators, and users of the Internet.  Note that it does
      not mean "correct" or "positive" - a report of an experiment that
      failed, or a specification that clearly says why you should not
      use it in a given situation, can be highly relevant - for deciding
      what NOT to do.  A part of being relevant is being timely - very
      often, documents delivered a year after core decisions have been
      taken are far less useful than documents that are available to the
      decision-makers at decision time.

3.  The Need for a Mission Statement

   The IETF has to make decisions.  And in some cases, people acting on
   behalf of the IETF have to make decisions without consulting the
   entire IETF first.

   There are many reasons for this, including the near-impossibility of
   getting an informed consensus opinion on a complex subject out of a
   community of several thousand people in a short time.

   Having a defined mission is one of the steps we can take in order to
   evaluate alternatives: Does this help or hinder the mission, or is it
   orthogonal to it? If there are limited resources, are there things
   that they could be invested in that help the mission better?

   (Another step is to choose leaders that we trust to exercise their
   good judgement and do the right thing.  But we're already trying to
   do that.)

4.  Issues with Scoping the IETF's Mission

4.1.  The Scope of the Internet

   A very difficult issue in discussing the IETF's mission has been the
   scope of the term "for the Internet".  The Internet is used for many
   things, many of which the IETF community has neither interest nor
   competence in making standards for.

   The Internet isn't value-neutral, and neither is the IETF.  We want
   the Internet to be useful for communities that share our commitment
   to openness and fairness.  We embrace technical concepts such as
   decentralized control, edge-user empowerment and sharing of
   resources, because those concepts resonate with the core values of
   the IETF community.  These concepts have little to do with the
   technology that's possible, and much to do with the technology that
   we choose to create.

   At the same time, it is clear that many of the IETF-defined
   technologies are useful not only for the Internet, but also for
   networks that have no direct relation to the Internet itself.

   In attempting to resolve the question of the IETF's scope, perhaps
   the fairest balance is struck by this formulation: "protocols and
   practices for which secure and scalable implementations are expected
   to have wide deployment and interoperation on the Internet, or to
   form part of the infrastructure of the Internet."

   In addition to this constraint, we are also constrained by the
   principle of competence: Where we do not have, and cannot gather, the
   competence needed to make technically sound standards, we should not
   attempt to take the leadership.

4.2.  The Balance Between Research, Invention and Adoption

   The IETF has traditionally been a community for experimentation with
   things that are not fully understood, standardization of protocols
   for which some understanding has been reached, and publication of
   (and refinement of) protocols originally specified outside the IETF
   process.

   All of these activities have in common that they produce documents -
   but the documents should be judged by very different criteria when
   the time to publish comes around, and it's not uncommon to see people
   confused about what documents are in which category.

   In deciding whether or not these activities should be done within the
   IETF, one should not chiefly look at the type of activity, but the
   potential benefit to the Internet - an experiment that yields
   information about the fact that an approach is not viable might be of
   greater benefit to the Internet than publishing a standard that is
   technically competent, but only useful in a few special cases.

   For research of an essentially unbounded nature, with unknown
   probability of success, it may be more relevant to charter a research
   group than a standards group.  For activities with a bounded scope -
   such as specifying several alternative protocols to the point where
   experiments can identify the better one for standardization - the
   IETF's working group mechanism may be an appropriate tool.

4.3.  The Balance Between Mission and Procedures

   The mission is intended to state what the IETF is trying to achieve.
   There are many methods that can be chosen to achieve these outcomes -
   for instance, the appeals procedure is defined so that we can detect
   cases where our fundamental principles of technical competence and
   open process has been violated; it is not itself a fundamental value.

   Similarly, the question of what body in the IETF declares that a
   document is ready for publication is entirely outside the mission
   statement; we can imagine changing that without in any way impacting
   what the IETF mission is - even though it may significantly impact
   the ability to achieve that mission.

4.4.  The Reach of the Internet

   The Internet is a global phenomenon.  The people interested in its
   evolution are from every culture under the sun and from all walks of
   life.  The IETF puts its emphasis on technical competence, rough
   consensus and individual participation, and needs to be open to
   competent input from any source.  The IETF uses the English language
   for its work is because of its utility for working in a global
   context.

4.5.  Protocol Ownership

   A problem akin to the problem of deciding on the area of the IETF's
   competence arises when a protocol that is clearly in the IETF's scope
   is used both on and off the Internet - the premier example is of
   course the Internet Protocol itself.

   Sometimes the IETF defines standards that ultimately see the most use
   outside the global Internet.  The IETF, having defined the standard,
   will continue to provide the necessary administration of that
   protocol.

   Sometimes the IETF leverages standards that are defined and
   maintained by other organizations; we continue to work with those
   organizations on their standards and do not attempt to take them
   over.

5. Security Considerations

   Considering security is one of the core principles of sound network
   engineering for the Internet.  Apart from that, it's not relevant to
   this memo.

6.  Acknowledgements

   This document is a result of many hours of debate, countless reviews,
   and limitless emails.  As such, any acknowledgements section is bound
   to be incomplete.

   Among the many who provided input were the current members of the
   IESG (Alex Zinin, Allison Mankin, Bert Wijnen, Bill Fenner, David
   Kessens, Jon Peterson, Margaret Wasserman, Russ Housley, Scott
   Hollenbeck, Steve Bellovin, Ted Hardie, Thomas Narten) and recent
   IESG members (Ned Freed, Randy Bush, Erik Nordmark), as well as
   multiple IAB members, and many members from the community, including
   James Polk, John Klensin, Pekka Savola, Paul Hoffman, Eliot Lear,
   Jonne Soininen, Fred Baker, Dean Anderson, John Leslie, Susan Harris,
   and many others.  Special thanks go to Leslie Daigle, the IAB chair.

Author's Address

   Harald Tveit Alvestrand
   Cisco Systems
   Weidemanns vei 27
   Trondheim  7043
   NO

   EMail: harald@alvestrand.no

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