Subject: Re: [Diversity] [irtf-discuss] Bridging the Gap between Internet Standardization and Networking Research

From: Joe Touch <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2014 13:33:09 -0800

Hi, Alvaro (et al.),

On 2/25/2014 12:22 PM, Alvaro Retana (aretana) wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I received my copy of the latest CCR over the weekend — one of the
> articles that caught my eye is 'Bridging the Gap between Internet
> Standardization and Networking Research'; it talks about the challenges
> of increasing the participation of network researchers in SDOs like the
> IETF.  I'll let you read it for yourselves:
> http://www.sigcomm.org/sites/default/files/ccr/papers/2014/January/2567561-2567572.pdf
>
> The problem of attracting researchers (and others) to the IETF is timely
> as there have been recent discussions about rebooting RGs, and in

The IETF isn't the IRTF; I think the goal of the article is engaging 
researchers more in the IETF side of the house.

> general about diversity..an earlier version of the paper was also
> presented at the recent 'IAB Workshop on Internet Technology Adoption
> and Transition' in December [1].
>
> LACNOG started an effort last year to attract more participants from the
> region to the IETF [2].  The original focus was naturally on operators —
> but under Juliao Braga's leadership we're organizing the 'I Workshop
> pre-IETF' in Brazil later this year (http://iwpietf.lacnog.org/), in
> conjunction with the largest academic computing event in the country [3].
>
> One of the "features" of the workshop, which is what I really want to
> share with you, is the "Post-Workshop Committee", which will work with
> the authors to (as needed and as appropriate) submit the work to the
> IETF/IRTF: guidance, mentoring, editing, etc.  The objective is then to
> help close that gap between standardization and research..while
> increasing awareness and participation.

But there's an underlying disconnect here - in the past, researchers 
were able to get support to participate in the IETF in various ways, 
because the Internet was considered a research effort in some way.

Those days are long gone.

> If anyone is interested in talking about this topic, I will be in London
> next week.  Unfortunately, Juliao won't, but I know he's available on
> e-mail. :-)

I won't be there either; I found that, as a researcher, I was being 
increasingly asked to provide free consulting for companies, while I was 
having increasing difficulty both getting funds to support attending and 
justifying use of those funds for IETF participation.

This is part of the reason why there are few (if any) academics at the 
higher levels of the IETF - few of us have enough support that we can 
burn 20-80% of it on the IETF as an unpaid consultant.

So while I appreciate the goal of this, if there's no money to back it 
up I fear it will not bear fruit.

Joe

>
> Thanks!
>
> Alvaro.
>
>
>
> [1] http://www.iab.org/activities/workshops/itat/
> [2]
> http://www.internetsociety.org/articles/latin-american-participation-ietf-ietf-lac-task-force-begins-long-term-mission
> [3] http://csbc2014.cic.unb.br/index.php/i-workshop-pre-ietf

---

From: "Adrian Farrel" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 17:33:28 -0000

> burn 20-80% of it on the IETF as an unpaid consultant.

Hi Joe, I don't want to detract from what you said in the rest of your email
because it is true.

However, on this point...

On the IESG
Brian Haberman (Johns Hopkins University)
Stephen Farrell (Trinity College Dublin)
and Martin Stiemerling is just transferring to a University post.

Cheers,
Adrian

---

From: Joe Touch <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 10:40:47 -0700

> and Martin Stiemerling is just transferring to a University post.

Yes, there are three academics out of 15 main members. And two people 
from each of three different companies.

And 2 of 13 on the IAB.

Looking at the IESG, IAB, and WG chairs as a set, the numbers are small, 
esp. given there are individual companies with comparable numbers.

Yes, they're not zero.

Joe

---

From: Stephen Farrell <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 18:35:52 +0000

> esp. given there are individual companies with comparable numbers.

And you're both right:-)

I think the parts of the CCR article I'd question are the assertions
that providing free consulting is objectionable (don't recall if that
was in CCR or just Joe's mail) and that the Internet is no longer a
research topic.

On the former: maybe I'm a hopeless idealist but educating people
from companies or anywhere is something that senior academics (and
that's me off the hook:-) should be doing even if not paid, but its
quite understandable that different folks have different thresholds
for what's acceptable there.

On the latter, I think we could do some work to reduce the correctly
described perception that the Internet is not a research topic, if
we academics did some more (but not exclusively) realistic research,
e.g., if we no longer accepted "my non-reproducible ns-2 thing is
better than yours" as justifying a publication that might help push
researchers to work more with the real Internet and might eventually
leak over into funders brains. (There are some folks doing that kind
of good work and e.g. the ANRP prizes are encouraging that I hope.)

S.

---

From: Joe Touch <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 11:45:48 -0700

On 3/10/2014 11:35 AM, Stephen Farrell wrote:
...
> for what's acceptable there.

Being paid is one issue, and while I agree there are some nuances, I 
think there's a big difference between discussing the broad concepts of 
tunneling and MTU vs spending a lot of time on Google's latest crusade 
to convert TCP into their personally-optimized transport.

A bigger, hopefully less contentious concern is direct cost - given a 
travel budget, is attending the IETF research or outreach? And is the 
latter a part of my research contract (nope).

Joe

---

From: Joe Touch <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 12:05:03 -0700

One additional point on teaching...

>> for what's acceptable there.

Additionally, academics are paid to teach students at their own 
universities, not to roam the world performing unpaid service -- any 
more than programmers at commercial companies are expected to spend 
their spare time writing programs for others.

Our jobs and our employers have priorities and a market, whether we're 
academics or in industry.

Joe

---

From: Abdussalam Baryun <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 09:12:16 +0100

Thanks Alvaro,

There are difficulties for researchers to interact with IETF. The IETF
behavior is still not ready, to interact with researchers that usually
prefer IEEE publications. IEEE is working more closer and more efficiently
and more diverse.

I spoke once to a Professor in routing, and asked why his protocol was not
proposed into IETF, the answer was yes he remotely submitted his draft but
IETF WG did not reply nor comment. I thought that the WG chair is May
be sleeping or ignored researchers :-)

IETF should be more diverse in responding to drafts, usually they look at
companies or high ranked universities to only get in. That is not fair.

IETF needs to look into remote work more seriously. Usually researchers
work remotely but companies like face to face (f2f) working. So IETF is
mostly f2f driven.

Best regards

AB

On Tuesday, February 25, 2014, Alvaro Retana (aretana) wrote:

>  Hi!
>
>  I received my copy of the latest CCR over the weekend -- one of the
> Standardization and Networking Research'; it talks about the challenges of
> increasing the participation of network researchers in SDOs like the IETF.
>  I'll let you read it for yourselves:
> as there have been recent discussions about rebooting RGs, and in general
> about diversity..an earlier version of the paper was also presented at the
> recent 'IAB Workshop on Internet Technology Adoption and Transition' in
> December [1].
>
> region to the IETF [2].  The original focus was naturally on operators --
> share with you, is the "Post-Workshop Committee", which will work with the
> authors to (as needed and as appropriate) submit the work to the IETF/IRTF:
> guidance, mentoring, editing, etc.  The objective is then to help close
> that gap between standardization and research..while increasing awareness
> and participation.
>

---

From: Bob Briscoe <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 19:54:15 +0000

Joe,

Perhaps the US research funding agencies could learn something from 
the EC, which offers both academic and industrial research 
institutions 100% of the cost of dissemination of the outputs of an 
EC research project into standards bodies.

At least that is how Framework 7 funding now works, but this is now 
starting to be superceded by Horizon 2020. I believe the H2020 model 
is to fund all the research and dissemination 100%, but excluding overheads.

It's still hard to have to shepherd your research through years of 
standardisation, given typical research projects last ~3 years. 
First, of course, you have to budget for dissemination up front. But 
if you start out knowing you will need to standardise outputs, it is 
possible to plan this, or to initiate a follow-on project that majors 
on standardisation and implementation (the following earlier CCR 
article discusses this):

Bagnulo Braun, M., Eardley, P., Eggert, L. & Winter, R., "How to 
Contribute Research Results to Internet Standardization," Computer 
Communication Review 41(3):10--13 (July 2011)

It was also published as an IRTF RFC:
Eardley, P., Eggert, L., Bagnulo Braun, M. & Winter, R., "How to 
Contribute Research Results to Internet Standardization," Internet 
Research Task Force Request for Comments rfc6147 (November 2011)

Bob

At 19:05 10/03/2014, Joe Touch wrote:
>Our jobs and our employers have priorities and a market, whether 
>we're academics or in industry.
>
>Joe

________________________________________________________________
Bob Briscoe,                                                  BT

---

From: Joe Touch <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 17:35:18 -0700

On 3/11/2014 12:54 PM, Bob Briscoe wrote:
> Joe,
>
> Perhaps the US research funding agencies could learn something from the
> EC, which offers both academic and industrial research institutions 100%
> of the cost of dissemination of the outputs of an EC research project
> into standards bodies.

The US sources don't balk at transferring technology into the standards 
organizations; that was the source of much of my past participation..

However, they don't support me to help review what has become a 
denial-of-service attack flood of drafts in certain areas, especially 
when those drafts come from large organizations that IMO ought to do 
some level of internal training and review before flooding the IETF with 
their newbies who expect free training.

Joe