Subject: RE: Proposed statement quotes wrong numbers

From: "Christian Huitema" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 14:00:56 -0800

In fact, if you go back to the archives of the 1992 discussions, it was
perceived then that the previous structure did not scale. For example,
the IAB was in charge of reviewing every RFC before it could be
published, and as the number of WG increased that became a bottleneck. A
lot of the 1992 effort was about designing a structure that would scale
better -- i.e. scale for much more than the 600-700 participants at the
time.

I am not sure that the IETF problems are primarily a scaling issue.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Sunday, October 26, 2003 9:35 PM
> To: Christian Huitema; [email-masked]; [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: Proposed statement quotes wrong numbers
> 
> Christian,
> 
> thanks for the correction.
> We can quibble about the exact dates for a while, but I've made the
quip
> quite a few times that the IETF has a fine scalable management
structure,
> which will scale all the way to 700 participants...... so I agree that
> "order of magnitude" is a misnomer.
> 
> We do, however, have trouble, even at our currently reduced size.
> 
>                  Harald
> 
> --On 23. oktober 2003 22:40 -0700 Christian Huitema
> <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> > The statement that you issued repeatedly mentions that the IETF
rules
> > and social contract were establish at a time when the IETF had 50 to
250
> > or 50 to 300 members. The obvious implication is that, since the
> > attendance has grown by an order of magnitude, the rules have to
change
> > significantly.
> >
> > The problem is that the 50-300 numbers are wrong. The original rules
of
> > the IETF were indeed devised in 1986, when the IETF was just created
and
> > had maybe 30-50 members. However, the current rules were designed in
> > 1992-1993, in large part because the IETF had outgrown the previous
> > rules. If you look at
http://www.ietf.org/meetings/past.meetings.html,
> > you will see that the attendance then was in the 500-700 range. Dave
> > Clark's statement was made during the 24th IETF, held July 13-17,
1992
> > in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There were 677 attendees.
> >
> > Since then, the IETF has grown, and then shrunk. The current size is
> > about double the size of 1992. That is significant, but not quite an
> > order of magnitude.
> >
> > -- Christian Huitema
> >
> 
> 
>