Subject: Adelaide Tao minutes

From: "Susan R. Harris" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Aug 2000 15:31:08 -0400 (EDT)

Hi everyone - here are minutes from the Pittsburgh USV discussion of "The
Tao of IETF," FYI 17.  (BTW, the most scintillating, vital,
not-to-be-missed, entertaining part of this message is at the very end.)

By way of background, the original Tao, written by Gary Malkin, was
revised most recently in 1994.  Just before the Adelaide meeting, I
volunteered to update the doc; in Adelaide, we decided to combine it with
Paul Hoffman's "Novice's Guide to the IETF"
(http://www.imc.org/novice-ietf.html).  Since then, Donald Eastlake and
Amy Wells contributed many useful edits to the original Tao.

I didn't get very far with the revision until early July, when Paul
rescued me, and volunteered to submit a draft combining the two docs on my
behalf (draft-ietf-uswg-tao-00.txt).

In response to questions raised recently on the mailing list, one of the
first topics discussed was whether the Tao should be published as one
document or two.  This came up because the new draft covers two distinct
topics: information for face-to-face meeting attendees, and information
for those who participate remotely by contributing to mailing lists,
reading drafts, etc.  

We agreed that one document makes the most sense, partly to avoid
back-and-forth confusion for readers, and partly because it's important
for all attendees to understand some of the inner workings of IETF in
order to figure out how to participate.

Joyce noted that at ISI, new employees are often asked to read the core
Internet RFCs before attending IETF, so they're well informed beforehand.
This is the ideal, and the new Tao will also provide or point to a lot of
information from the basic RFCs.

The question came up, "what happens to I-Ds after they're written?"  To
answer that, we thought that RFC 2026, "The Internet Standards Process,"
could be boiled down - possibly to one paragraph that would be added to
the Tao.

Why are so many new drafts coming in?  Perhaps people are trying to
influence the press, being able to say "our company's standard is now
being discussed in the IETF."

Why do people decide to go to IETF meetings in the first place? Some are
simply curious about a particular technology, e.g., they want to learn
more about PPP.  A WG attendee (I'd be glad to add your name!) noted that
he'd come to IETF to figure out how he could get his company to
participate effectively, given that only a few employees can come to the
meeting.  We agreed that the current Tao doesn't help in this area, and
that we'll add information for companies  - with a caveat, Joyce noted.
IETF is not the place to come, take notes, and "report back to the boss."
It's a place to actively participate.

It's important that the Tao get across the suggestion, "if you're going to
come to the meeting, here's a way you can help."  You don't need to wait
till the next meeting, or, if travel is prohibitively expensive, you don't
even need to be here physically in order to attend. RFC 2028, "The
Organizations Involved in the IETF Standards Process," does a good job of
explaining how WGs work so people can participate remotely.

It's also important to explain that the IETF is not a typical standards
organization.  It's more informal than many, and attendees are not at IETF
to represent their companies.

The new Tao shouldn't be chatty - it should be friendly, grab the reader's
attention, and be succinct.  It should make the IETF sound fun and
intriguing.

Attendees represent different constituencies and need to answer different
questions before attending:

	- If you're a manager, you need to decide who you should send to
          the meeting. 
	- If you're coming, you need info about participating (info about
	  mailing lists, archives etc.). 
	- If you're coming, you also need information about meeting
	  logistics.	

We decided to write a couple of paragraphs for each constituency that
attends IETF, so people won't feel out of it when they arrive. The
constituencies are:

	- Academics 
	- Operators 
	- Vendors 
	- Managers (?)
	- More?

It'd also be good for someone from those constituencies to talk about
their experiences and include that information in the Tao, so others with
like interests can benefit from the information.

We should note that American English is the de facto language of the IETF.
We should say something like "we appear to be dominating but this is only
by accident because the meeting was originally convened by academics in
the U.S. We're not conspiring against you."

Someone suggested that we add text about the shortcomings of IETF, like
the fact that WG charters are often out-of-date. Paul said that he'd been
asked to leave similar text out of his document, so we decided to omit it
too.  However, we'll include Paul's text noting that some WG chairs are
better than others.

For the FAQ, Steve Coya will give us a list of questions commonly directed
to the Secretariat.  The section on mirror sites will be eliminated, with
Web links provided instead. 

Instead of adding Chris' text about the Adelaide T-shirt BOF (sent to the
list) we could add a brief new section, saying that T-shirts are given
out, and people really like them ...  (Paul, your wording was better but
unfortunately I can't decipher my notes here.)

-----------------------
OK, it's time to sign on the dotted line.  Which parts of the new doc
would you like to work on?  I'll coordinate the edits and submit a new
draft early this fall.
Thanks in advance.

---

From: Walter Houser <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 10:26:28 -0400

At Pittsburgh I volunteered to help on updating FYI 7. Roy said there was a
draft update on the list, but I could not get into the archive at
ftp://ftp.near.net/mail-archives/us-wg  (550 no such directory)  Help!?

--
Walt Houser, VA Webmaster http://www.va.gov/
VA Privacy Notice for Information Collected from E-mails and Web Forms
http://www.va.gov/privacy/email.asp

---

From: April Marine <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 08:32:28 -0700 (PDT)

Hmmm, this points out that I have not told Steve about the new archive,
just the new list!  Doh!  The new archive is at:

http://www.isc.org/ml-archives/uswg/2000/maillist.html

But it is only as old as the list (couldn't get the old stuff over), so I
am not sure the draft Ray spoke of is there.  I am sure he'd be happy to
re-send. :)

Thanks for checking! 

April