[ih] IETF relevance (was Memories of Flag Day?)

[Dave Crocker]

On 8/30/2023 10:17 AM, Darius Kazemi via Internet-history wrote:
> Comparing the NWG (at least in the early days of NCP) and IETF seems to me
> like comparing a radical experiment in collaboration, experimentation, and
> flexibility to... a standards body. Very much apples to oranges?

I disagree.

The real process today is bottom-up development of community interest in 
a topic.  Same as much of the original Arpanet work. (No, no all.  But 
much.)  Given enough interest, work proceeds. When and whether the 
formal IETF process come into play varies enormously.  And it should.

The formal anointing of a working group is quite different in the IETF 
that it was in the Arpanet,  And yet...

RFC733 came out of Arpa tasking a few of us with stabilizing email 
content formats.  The 'official' group of 4 of us had extensive and 
ongoing interactions with the community, eventually converging on what 
was published.  We asked Arpa to let the title include the word 
'standard' as a way of signaling that this had 'official' support.  
(There was some public outcry at our officiousness.  Still, it worked.)

The process of producing RFC822, which adapted RFC733 to the Internet, 
was similar, albeit with only one editor.

MIME and ESMTP came out of Vint's tasking one of his folk to get email 
to support International character sets. These work was done fully in 
the relatively new IETF.

My point is that the spirit of the process for then and now is, for the 
most part and of course IMO, really quite similar.  And this shouldn't 
be surprising.  The culture of specification development that the 
Arpanet had was spectacularly successful and explicitly maintained into 
the formal IETF.

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
mast:@dcrocker at mastodon.social