Internet Engineering Task Force
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP).[3] It has no formal membership roster or requirements and all its participants are volunteers. Their work is usually funded by employers or other sponsors.
"IETF" redirects here. For other uses, see IETF (disambiguation).Abbreviation
IETF[1]
January 14, 1986[2]
Creating voluntary standards to maintain and improve the usability and interoperability of the Internet
The IETF was initially supported by the federal government of the United States but since 1993 has operated under the auspices of the Internet Society, a non-profit organization with local chapters around the world.
Meetings[edit]
The first IETF meeting was attended by 21 US Federal Government-funded researchers on 16 January 1986. It was a continuation of the work of the earlier GADS Task Force. Representatives from non-governmental entities (such as gateway vendors[27]) were invited to attend starting with the fourth IETF meeting in October 1986. Since that time all IETF meetings have been open to the public.[2]
Initially, the IETF met quarterly, but from 1991, it has been meeting three times a year. The initial meetings were very small, with fewer than 35 people in attendance at each of the first five meetings. The maximum attendance during the first 13 meetings was only 120 attendees. This occurred at the 12th meeting held during January 1989. These meetings have grown in both participation and scope a great deal since the early 1990s; it had a maximum attendance of 2,810 at the December 2000 IETF held in San Diego, California. Attendance declined with industry restructuring during the early 2000s, and is currently around 1,200.[28][2]
The location for IETF meetings vary greatly. A list of past and future meeting locations can be found on the IETF meetings page.[29] The IETF strives to hold its meetings near where most of the IETF volunteers are located. For many years, the goal was three meetings a year, with two in North America and one in either Europe or Asia, alternating between them every other year. The current goal is to hold three meetings in North America, two in Europe and one in Asia during a two-year period. However, corporate sponsorship of the meetings is also an important factor and the schedule has been modified from time to time in order to decrease operational costs.
The IETF also organizes hackathons during the IETF meetings. The focus is on implementing code that will improve standards in terms of quality and interoperability.[30]
Operations[edit]
The details of IETF operations have changed considerably as the organization has grown, but the basic mechanism remains publication of proposed specifications, development based on the proposals, review and independent testing by participants, and republication as a revised proposal, a draft proposal, or eventually as an Internet Standard. IETF standards are developed in an open, all-inclusive process in which any interested individual can participate. All IETF documents are freely available over the Internet and can be reproduced at will. Multiple, working, useful, interoperable implementations are the chief requirement before an IETF proposed specification can become a standard.[2] Most specifications are focused on single protocols rather than tightly interlocked systems. This has allowed the 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).
Because it relies on volunteers and uses "rough consensus and running code" as its touchstone, results can be slow whenever the number of volunteers is either too small to make progress, or so large as to make consensus difficult, or when volunteers lack the necessary expertise. 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 that is not fully backward compatible, except for IPv6. Work within the IETF on ways to improve the speed of the standards-making process is ongoing but, because the number of volunteers with opinions on it is very great, consensus on improvements has been slow to develop.
The IETF cooperates with the W3C, ISO/IEC, ITU, and other standards bodies.[10]
Statistics are available that show who the top contributors by RFC publication are.[31] While the IETF only allows for participation by individuals, and not by corporations or governments, sponsorship information is available from these statistics.
