The Internet Engineering Task Force is one of the older – and more unusual – internet organizations. It first met in 1986, and has regularly met since then several times a year. The last meeting was the March 2-7, 2014 IETF89 in London, and I was fortunate to be in attendance.
What Makes the IETF Unique
What’s unusual about the IETF? From my perspective as someone who spends most of his working day dealing with more traditional standards bodies, two things stand out.
One, (in its own words) “it exists as a collection of happenings, but is not a corporation and has no board of directors, no members, and no dues.” The non-members divide themselves into loosely organized groups that agree on an agenda, discuss the stuff of the internet on mailing lists, generate documents that reflect consensus, and then agree to them as standards.
Two, the London IETF89 meeting was not a conference. The IETF doesn’t do conferences; there are no formal papers given by luminaries or industry experts. There is an agenda, agreed beforehand by consensus (there’s that word again) and then a few short and brief presentations on topics of interest. There are questions from the floor, discussions, and agreement of one form or another. I didn’t see a single formal vote; just that ill-defined and unquantifiable consensus where the outcome is just, well, agreed on.
Why the IETF Works
Revolution! Anarchy! This is unusual for a standards body, and it sounds like a recipe for disaster. But strangely, it isn’t, and from what I saw of the process, I think I see why.
It’s because it’s attended by software and network engineers who see code as the concrete representation of a good idea. They value running code, or stuff that works. That’s a powerful advantage over academic discussions, or codifying and formalizing a good (sometimes not-so-good) idea that no-one has yet implemented or is ever likely to.
Why face to face though? I reckon that even revolutionaries and anarchists need validation and a sense of community, and there was much of that in evidence in the corridors and public spaces outside of the formal meeting. Everyone talks like there’s no tomorrow. Ideas everywhere, grounded in what can be shown to actually work.
I attended, amongst others, the NFSv4 workgroup meetings. The agenda and notes from the meeting give some flavor of this consensus, and I am truly impressed by the process. I’m also thankful that there is some organization; Sorin Faibish (EMC) took notes, Tome Haynes (NetApp) chaired the meeting and kept it moving along, and all in all it was a great illustration of the best the industry can do.
As to the technical content… well, you can read the minutes. There are notes on security discussions led by Andy Adamson, on features proposed for NFSv4.2, and getting an RFC in place that accurately reflects implementations of earlier versions of NFSv4 and more. I’ll be blogging about this and more over the next few months. In the meanwhile, in the spirit of the IETF that favors working code over ideas and the concrete over the abstract, I’ll be presenting “Practical Steps to Implementing pNFS and NFSv4.1” at DSIcon on April 22-24 in Santa Clara, CA. OK, this one’s a conference, and anarchy will be in short supply, but we can still have great discussions and arguments in the corridors and public spaces outside of the formal meetings. I look forward to seeing you there!