The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standard bodies; and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IP and Internet protocol suite. It is an open, all-volunteer standards organization, with no formal membership or membership requirements. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... ISO has many meanings: Iso is the stem of the Latin transliteration of the Greek word ίσος (ísos, meaning equal). The iso- prefix in English derives from this and means equality or similarity. ... The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) is an international standards organization dealing with electrical, electronic and related technologies. ... The Internet protocol suite is the set of communications protocols that implement the protocol stack on which the Internet runs. ... The Internet protocol suite is the set of communications protocols that implement the protocol stack on which the Internet and most commercial networks run. ... A standards organization, also referred to as standards development organization or SDO, is any entity whose primary activities are developing, coordinating, promulgating, revising, amending, reissuing, interpreting, or otherwise maintaining standards that address the interests of a wide base of users outside the standards development organization. ...

It is organized into a large number of working groups and BoFs, each dealing with a specific topic, and intended to complete work on that topic and then shut down. Each working group has an appointed chair (or sometimes several co-chairs), along with a charter that describes its focus, and what and when it is expected to produce. An IETF working group, or WG for short, is a working group of the IETF. It operates on rough consensus, is open to all who want to participate, has discussions on an open mailing list, and may hold meetings at IETF meetings. ... BoF is an acronym for birds of a feather. This idiom is a shortening of the proverb birds of a feather flock together, meaning that people (birds) of the same kind or interest (of a common feather) enjoy spending time (flocking) together. ...

The working groups are organized into areas by subject matter; each area is overseen by an area director (AD) (most areas have 2 co-AD's); the ADs appoint working group chairs. The area directors, together with the IETF Chair, form the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), which is responsible for the overall operation of the IETF. The Internet Engineering Steering Group is a body composed of the Internet Engineering Task Force Chair and Area Directors: Internet Area (int) Operations & Management Area (ops) Routing Area (rtg) Security Area (sec) Transport Area (tsv) Temporary Sub-IP Area (sub) and so on. ...

The IETF is formally an activity under the umbrella of the Internet Society. The IETF is overseen by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), which oversees its external relationships, and relations with the RFC Editor. The IAB is also jointly responsible for the IETF Administrative Oversight Committee (IAOC), which oversees the IETF Administrative Support Activity (IASA), which provides logistical, etc support for the IETF. The IAB also manages the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), with which the IETF has a number of cross-group relations. The Internet Society or ISOC is an international organization that promotes Internet use and access. ... The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) is a committee of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). ... Alternate meaning: Wikipedia:Requests for comment A Request for Comments (RFC) document is one of a series of numbered Internet informational documents and standards very widely followed by both commercial software and freeware in the Internet and Unix communities. ... The IETF Administrative Support Activity (IASA) is an activity housed within the Internet Society (ISOC). ... The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) is a sister group to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). ...

IETF working groups

Main article: IETF working group

In IETF working groups operate on rough consensus, is open to all who want to participate, has discussions on an open mailing list, and may hold meetings at IETF meetings. Unlike, for instance, IEEE working groups, the mailing list consensus is the final arbiter of decision-making, and there is no voting, but rather a consensus decision-making procedure. An IETF working group, or WG for short, is a working group of the IETF. It operates on rough consensus, is open to all who want to participate, has discussions on an open mailing list, and may hold meetings at IETF meetings. ... A working group (WG) is an interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers working on new research activities that would be difficult to develop under traditional funding mechanisms (e. ... Consensus has two common meanings. ... Electronic mailing lists are a special usage of e-mail that allows for widespread distribution of information to many Internet users. ... The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers or IEEE (pronounced as eye-triple-ee) is an international non-profit, professional organization incorporated in the State of New York, United States. ... Consensus decision-making is a decision process that not only seeks the agreement of most participants, but also to resolve or mitigate the objections of the minority to achieve the most agreeable decision. ...

An IETF working group is created by the IESG to work on a limited set of tasks described in its charter, and will normally be closed once the work described in its charter is finished. In some cases, the WG will instead have its charter updated to take on new tasks as appropriate. The Internet Engineering Steering Group is a body composed of the Internet Engineering Task Force Chair and Area Directors: Internet Area (int) Operations & Management Area (ops) Routing Area (rtg) Security Area (sec) Transport Area (tsv) Temporary Sub-IP Area (sub) and so on. ...

Details of the IETF working group process can be found in RFC 2418.

History

The first IETF meeting was on January 16, 1986, consisting of 21 U.S.-government-funded researchers. Initially, it met quarterly, but from 1991, it has been meeting 3 times a year. Representatives from non-government vendors were invited starting with the fourth IETF meeting, in October of that year. Since that time all IETF meetings have been open to anyone. The majority of the IETF's work is done on mailing lists, however, and meeting attendance is not required for contributors. January 16 is the 16th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1986 (MCMLXXXVI) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

The initial meetings were very small, with less than 35 people in attendance at each of the first five meetings and with the peak attendance in the first 13 meetings of only 120 attendees, at the 12th meeting in January of 1989. It has grown in both participation and scope a great deal since the early 90s; it had a peak attendance of almost 3000 at the December 2000 IETF held in San Diego, CA. Attendance declined with industry restructuring in the early 2000s, and is currently around 1300.

During the early 1990s the IETF changed institutional form from an activity of the U.S. government to an independent, international activity associated with the Internet Society.

The IETF has at times been ascribed nearly magical abilities by the trade press, who assumed its mechanisms were responsible for the success of the Internet because it works on the Internet's core protocols. The reality that it is a group of engineers putting together specifications so that multiple vendors' products can interoperate across networks is considerably more prosaic.

The details of its operations have changed considerably as it has grown, but the basic mechanism remains publication of draft specifications, review and independent testing by participants, and republication. Interoperability is the chief test for IETF specifications becoming standards. Most of its specifications are focused on single protocols rather than tightly-interlocked systems. This has allowed its protocols to be used in many different systems, and its standards are routinely re-used by bodies which create full-fledged architectures (e.g. 3GPP IMS). The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is a collaboration agreement that was established in December 1998. ... The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a standardised Next Generation Networking (NGN) architecture for telecom operators that want to provide mobile and fixed multimedia services. ...

Because it relies on volunteers and uses "rough consensus and running code" as its touchstone, it can, however, be slow whenever the number of volunteers is either too small to make progress or so large as to make consensus difficult. For protocols like SMTP, which is used to transport e-mail for a user community in the many hundreds of millions, there is also considerable resistance to any change which is not fully backwards compatible. Work within the IETF on ways to improve its speed is ongoing but, because the number of volunteers with opinions on it is very great, consensus mechanisms on how to improve have been slow to emerge.

List of IETF chairs

The IETF Chair is selected by the NOMCOM process specified in RFC 3777 for a 2-year term, renewable.

Before 1993, the IETF Chair was selected by the IAB. The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) is a committee of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). ...

• Mike Corrigan (1986)
• Phill Gross (1986–1994)
• Paul Mockapetris (1994–1996)
• Fred Baker (1996–2001)
• Harald Tveit Alvestrand (2001–2005)
• Brian Carpenter (2005–)

Dr. Paul V. Mockapetris proposed a Domain Name System (DNS) architecture in 1983 in RFCs 882 and 883 while at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) of the University of Southern California. ... Fred Baker was IETF chair from 1996 to 2001, when he was succeeded by Harald Tveit Alvestrand. ... Harald Tveit Alvestrand (b. ...

See also

• Request for Comments
• Internet standard
• Standardization
• IETF Working Group
• Internet Engineering Steering Group
• Internet Architecture Board
• Internet Research Task Force

In internetworking and computer network engineering, Request for Comments (RFC) documents are a series of memoranda encompassing new research, innovations, and methodologies applicable to Internet technologies. ... Internet standards are defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). ... Standardization, in the context related to technologies and industries, is the process of establishing a technical standard among competing entities in a market, where this will bring benefits without hurting competition. ... An IETF working group, or WG for short, is a working group of the IETF. It operates on rough consensus, is open to all who want to participate, has discussions on an open mailing list, and may hold meetings at IETF meetings. ... The Internet Engineering Steering Group is a body composed of the Internet Engineering Task Force Chair and Area Directors: Internet Area (int) Operations & Management Area (ops) Routing Area (rtg) Security Area (sec) Transport Area (tsv) Temporary Sub-IP Area (sub) and so on. ... The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) is a committee of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). ... The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) is a sister group to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). ...

External links and references

• The official IETF site
  • IETF Online Proceedings
  • Early IETF Proceedings (note: large pdf files, one for each volume)
  • Past Meetings of the IETF
  • IETF Chairs
• The Tao of the IETF: details on how IETF is organized (also as HTML)
• IAOC information

MyIETF Personalized notification service on RFC's and drafts with full archive of old drafts etc. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...