Subject: [newtrk] "Is IETF Primarily a Standards Organization?"

From: [email-masked] (Scott Bradner)
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 20:20:16 -0500 (EST)

>    It's time someone else weighed in on these issues...

its been said but I'll say it again 
>            "Hell, yes!"

what I say at the newcommers presentation
----------------
slide 4
IETF: meta View
   Internet standards R us
   does not exist, no members, no voting
   1,200 to 2K at 3/year meetings, NK on mail lists
      1,679 & 1304 last 2 meetings (San Francisco & Vienna)
   133ish working groups (where the stuff happens)
   8 areas (for organizational convenience) with ADs
      APS, GEN, INT, O&M, RTG, SEC, SUB, TSV
	SUB going away
   management: IESG (ADs, chosen by community)
   architectural guidance & liaisons: IAB
   produces standards

slide 5
IETF "Standards"
   standards only when people use them
   no formal recognition 
   no submitting to "traditional" bodies
      some of them keep trying to help

------------

clearly the IETF produces "standards" - I can not see how anyone could
conclude otherwise

	we maintain the standards for IP
	we produce standards for 100s of technologies from diffserv to
MPLS, from DHCP to SIP

	some of these might be considered more "standard" than others
in that soem are used more than others - but the IETF documents define
the specific technology - i.e. they are the standards for those
technologies and, since the IETF produces these documents, the IETF
is a standards development organization

Scott
.
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From: Bruce Campbell <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 9 Dec 2003 10:33:35 +0100 (CET)

> clearly the IETF produces "standards" - I can not see how anyone could

Agreed.

> 	we maintain the standards for IP

Yes, we should be.  In some (many?) cases, we're not doing even an
adequate job of 'maintain'ing the IP-related standards.

-- 
  Bruce Campbell                    I speak for myself
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From: Pete Resnick <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 11:59:06 -0600

On 12/8/03 at 12:19 PM -0800, Dave Crocker wrote:

>The modern IETF has been in operation for roughly 15 years. It has 
>participation and formal management, and it produces specifications 
>involving public consensus. By any reasonable measure, that makes it 
>a standards group.
>
>Standards groups use all sorts of language to describe themselves 
>and their products. None of this alters the nature of what they do.
>[...]
>The substantive point you offer is that we primarily do 
>"engineering". My own view is that that stopped being the core of 
>our work, quite a few years ago. The real engineering is done by one 
>or a few individuals.
>
>Larger bodies of folk do review and refinement. This is extremely 
>important, but it's not engineering. The instant a larger group, 
>like a working group, does the overall engineering task, we get the 
>same result any other design-by-committee effort gets.

I guess this means that most doctor's offices are PRIMARILY paper 
producing organizations. Most of the folks working in doctor's 
offices fill out paperwork, send bills, type up chart notes, deal 
with insurance companies, defend malpractice suits, etc. Doctor's 
offices can use all sorts of language to describe themselves and 
their products. None of this alters the nature of what they do. They 
stopped doing medicine years ago. The real "medicine" is only done by 
one or a few individuals, but if the larger group of administrative 
folks at a doctors office tries to "do the overall medical task".....

This is, of course, absurd. The primary purpose and product of a 
doctor's office is medical care, whether or not it is only a tiny 
portion of the actual activities of the members of that organization.

On 12/8/03 at 8:20 PM -0500, Scott Bradner wrote:

>clearly the IETF produces "standards" - I can not see how anyone 
>could conclude otherwise

I'm sorry Dave and Scott, but this has been one of the silliest 
exchanges I've seen in a while. *Of course* the IETF produces 
standards. That wasn't the question. The question was, "What is the 
organization, primarily?" It seems to me our primary purpose is to 
come up with interoperable solutions to problems on the net. 
Standards (and mind you, completely unenforceable, consensus based, 
more or less de facto but certainly not de dicto standards) are 
strictly by-products of that effort, whether or not most of our time 
and structure is dedicated to their production.

Even if I'm being a bit naive here and standards *are* one of our 
primary products, it seems to be still quite a different organization 
than others who are primarily standards organizations: The criteria 
for whether or not something can be a standard *is* its engineering 
quality and interoperability. It's not (or at least we try not to 
have it) based on political strength of the proposer, profitability 
of the proposal, or other non-engineering criteria. You can't (or 
shouldn't be able to) produce a standard in this organization without 
doing some engineering. I certainly know of other organizations where 
this is clearly not the case.

pr
-- 
Pete Resnick <http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
QUALCOMM Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102
.
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From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 12:37:54 -0800

Pete,

PR> I'm sorry Dave and Scott, but this has been one of the silliest
PR> exchanges I've seen in a while.

I see that you fail to appreciate the significant accomplishment in the
fact that Scott and I are _jointly_ exciting such a reaction from you.
My goodness but we are losing our sense of fun around here...

PR> *Of course* the IETF produces standards. That wasn't the question.
PR> The question was, "What is the organization, primarily?"

I'll have to agree that this discussion, and most of its type that I
have ever seen, do not look very productive. I'll guess that that is
because we are not careful about explaining what we mean by the various
terms, so that we can debate really meaning, rather than some sort of
vocabulary popularity contents.

PR> It seems to me our primary purpose is to come up with interoperable
PR> solutions to problems on the net.

I think that that is a very good statement, but let me push it a bit:

   Our primary purpose is to put forward interoperable solutions that
   are used on the net.

The two changes to your text are significant: "put forward" means that
we do not care where it comes from -- although, yes, we need to be
careful that no one thinks we do rubber-stamping -- and "used" means
that we care about actual utility, not just publishing specifications
that are plausible.

The semantic game about whether we do "engineering" is one that I think
is not at all minor, and that the disparity of views on this point
underlies quite a bit of IETF problems.

A doctor does not invent medicines in the office, when they are treating
you.  A hospital does not have random passers-by issue orders for your
treatment, though there might be a number of staff members offering
input to the doctor in charge of the case.

Similarly, it is a very, very rare working group that successfully does
the core design and specification work done in the open working group.
That's why we formalized design teams, to acknowledge the reality that
already existed.

A "standards body" is a social entity that seeks to develop support for
a specification.  I claim that this type of social activity as the real
core of the IETF's reason for being, and has been for at least a decade.

d/
--
 Dave Crocker <dcrocker-at-brandenburg-dot-com>
 Brandenburg InternetWorking <www.brandenburg.com>
 Sunnyvale, CA  USA <tel:+1.408.246.8253>

.

---

From: Pete Resnick <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 15:21:46 -0600

On 12/10/03 at 12:37 PM -0800, Dave Crocker wrote:

>I see that you fail to appreciate the significant accomplishment in 
>the fact that Scott and I are _jointly_ exciting such a reaction 
>from you. My goodness but we are losing our sense of fun around 
>here...

Too much travel lately; I must be grumpy.

>    Our primary purpose is to put forward interoperable solutions that

I'll buy that.

>...we care about actual utility, not just publishing specifications 
>that are plausible.

Strong agreement. Which is why I don't get:

>A "standards body" is a social entity that seeks to develop support 
>for a specification. I claim that this type of social activity as 
>the real core of the IETF's reason for being, and has been for at 
>least a decade.

We don't seek to develop support for *specifications*; we seek to 
develop support for, and sometimes actually develop, *solutions*. 
Specifications are the *means* not the *ends*. (Apparently I've been 
reading too much Kant.)

Now, don't get me wrong: I do think for the past decade we have seen 
a good deal of specification-only development going on in this 
organization. I take that as a significant part of the problem we're 
having with the 3-level standards track: Some folks are significantly 
more interested in writing specifications than getting deployment of 
interoperable implementations, and therefore can't get past the 
"Proposed Standard" level. And this probably also explains the reason 
we're seeing a bunch of people coming out of the woodwork asking for 
more (or a complete overhaul of) structures, processes, membership, 
etc.: If the end product is documents and not deployed code, all of 
those things become significantly more important. But I would hate to 
think that "the real core of the IETF's reason for being" has shifted 
from actually getting those solutions out there to simply doing 
specifications.

I still think of us as primarily a solutions organization, not a 
bunch of paper-pushers.

pr

---

From: mark seery <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2003 15:50:53 -0800

Hi Peter

Pete Resnick wrote:

<snip>
pr> Now, don't get me wrong: I do think for the past decade we have seen 
a good deal of specification-only development going on in this 
organization.

My opinion is that it is more the case that there are a number of 
efforts for which there is not universal consensus on and/or not 
universal deployment. So from some perspective they look like a 
specification-only development. So the interesting observation, IMHO, is 
the evolution of the "Internet" from a *relatively* small number of 
ubiquitously deployed standards, to a fractious universe of hetrogenity 
more typical of a "toolset" mentality. So the important question to ask, 
IMO, is if "x" specification is not universally deployed everywhere, do 
we then judge it as a failure and symptomatic of a broken system or do 
we simply observe that different people will use different tools for 
different reasons. This is of course not an insignificant or trivial 
issue as so much of the conceptual framework of the Internet is based on 
the concept of an "Internet layer".

<snip>
pr> I still think of us as primarily a solutions organization, not a 
bunch of paper-pushers.

So while I understant that your intent was to highlight the broader 
goals of interoperability and things that actually get used, but on the 
semantic issue a solution is probably closer to a reference 
implementation than a piece of paper, IMO.

IMO, the key tensions in this general area are:

-what does "engineering" mean? (i.e. competing specs that already have 
running code vs WG-developed spec before running code)
-the level of specification that meets the needs of "intreroperability" 
but leave an appropriate level of room for vendor-specifc innovation
-what does the "Internet layer" mean?

.

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 15:54:59 -0500

> running code vs WG-developed spec before running code)

Engineering means producing both specifications AND a high confidence 
that in practice that they'll efficiently (this includes 
cost-effectively) and reliably (this includes both protocol and 
document quality) meet the various needs established for those 
specifications.

If a suitable specification already exists, engineering can be as 
simple as establishing confidence that the solution will be efficient 
and reliably meet the needs set down for it.

If such a specification doesn't already exist, then it has to be 
developed.

In IETF the usual case is that a suitable specification doesn't already 
exist.  However there is sometimes a protocol that can serve as an 
example on which to base a suitable specification, and that protocol 
may have enjoyed some degree of implementation and/or deployment.  In 
most cases where this has been done the protocol as designed, 
implemented, or deployed has had some major shortcoming or another 
which needed to be fixed, such as: inadequate security, poor 
scalability, poor documentation, adverse impact on the network, or 
adverse impact on existing applications.

But to say that IETF must either do only standards or only engineering 
is to impose an artificial and unnecessary choice.  It does both.  
There are rare occasions when it is useful and appropriate for IETF to 
engineer solutions that it still doesn't wish to label as "standard".  
There are also rare occasions where it is useful and appropriate for 
IETF to bless existing specifications as "standard" with few or no 
changes.  But these are extreme points on a spectrum that are not 
representative of the effort that is typically needed.

IETF's job is to do what it can to make the Internet work well and to 
be more useful.  To this end, it produces various kinds of documents, 
including technical specifications, applicability statements, 
informational notes, reports, etc., that reflect the views of a diverse 
community of participants.  Some of these are standards track, some are 
not.  That's as it should be.

It's silly to think we should limit our efforts to one particular kind 
of output.  If anything, we need to be more flexible about what we 
generate.

.

---

From: mark seery <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 14:19:16 -0800

Hi Keith,

Keith Moore wrote:

> informational notes, reports, etc., that reflect the views of a 
> diverse community of participants.  Some of these are standards track, 
> some are not.  That's as it should be. 

If the contention is the belief that someone who asserts that the 
primary role of the IETF is to produce standards is interpreted to mean 
the IETF shouldn't produce other documents such as applicability 
statements, then there was a subtelty to this conversation I didn't 
initially grok. So let me say I agree with all those things being 
produced and see them as being very constructive, especially when 
deadlocks need to be broken.

> of output.  

I did not mean to infer that, and I don't believe others have asserted 
that. This thread started with a question of whether the IETF is 
primarily a standards body, followed by an assertion that it is. I 
believe that it is primarily a standards body, and that the standards 
created are arrived at through engineering practice (running code) and 
discussion (engineering theory). So I see an aspect of "engineering" as 
being an integral element of the standards (and other tracks) process. 
If some want to argue about whether "real" engineering is done, that is 
fine, but I haven't seen any compelling points presented that the 
"primary" role of the IETF is anything other than producing Internet 
standards.

There are many entities in our wider community that contribute to making 
the Internet work well, there are a variety of contributions the IETF 
makes in this respect, but making the Internet work well is not a 
mission owned solely by the IETF today - despite its historical ability 
to have solely owned this (which probably leads to another core 
discussion best had on another thread / mailer).

> If anything, we need to be more flexible about what we generate.

.

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2003 18:46:46 -0500

> This thread started with a question of whether the IETF is primarily a 
> standards body, followed by an assertion that it is. I believe that it 
> is primarily a standards body, and that the standards created are 
> arrived at through engineering practice (running code) and discussion 
> (engineering theory).

My belief is somewhat different - it is that IETF primarily exists to 
facilitate the Internet working well for a wide range of purposes, and 
that IETF employs various means to this end, of which the production of 
technical standards is only one.

.