Internet DRAFT - draft-arkko-ietf-iasa-thoughts
draft-arkko-ietf-iasa-thoughts
Internet Engineering Task Force J. Arkko
Internet-Draft Ericsson
Intended status: Informational March 26, 2017
Expires: September 27, 2017
Thoughts on IETF Administrative Support Activities (IASA)
draft-arkko-ietf-iasa-thoughts-00.txt
Abstract
This short memo outlines the author's thoughts about the challenges
and opportunities with the IETF's administrative support activities,
currently organised as part of the IETF Administrative Support
Activities (IASA), IETF Administrative Oversight Committee (IAOC),
and IETF Trust.
This memo is just input for discussion that the IETF community should
have. The memo is a part of the author's goal to document the status
and various challenges and opportunities in the context of the so
called "IASA 2.0" project.
The memo has no particular official standing, nor does it claim to
represent more than the authors' thinking at the time of writing.
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on September 14, 2017.
Copyright Notice
Copyright (c) 2017 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
document authors. All rights reserved.
Arkko Expires September 14, 2017 [Page 1]
Internet-Draft IASA 2.0 Thoughts March 2017
This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
(http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
publication of this document. Please review these documents
carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must
include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of
the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as
described in the Simplified BSD License.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Changes, Challenges, and Opportunities . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
4. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1. Introduction
The arrangements relating to administrative support for the IETF
(IASA, RFC 4071 [RFC4071]) were created more than ten years ago, when
the IETF initially took charge of its own administration. The
arrangements have served the IETF well, but there's been considerable
change in the necessary tasks, in the world around us, and our own
expectations since the creation of the IASA. Looking forward, this
is a good time to ask what administrative arrangements best support
the IETF in the next ten years.
Background for this analysis are the various challenges and
frustrations we have experienced along the way, for instance around
meeting arrangements. But we also need to ask the bigger questions
about how the organisations are structured. What kind of support we
need in the coming years, from the point of view of the community,
IESG, IAB, IAOC, Trust, and our partners such as ISOC, meeting hosts
or contractors? Areas to look at include structure, financing and
sponsorship arrangements, organisation, and ways of working. This is
the context of the so called "IASA 2.0" project [IASA20].
This document gives the author's view on structure and ways of
working in the current IASA arrangements. This memo is just input
for discussion that the IETF community should have. The memo is a
part of the author's goal to document the status and various
challenges and opportunities in IASA.
The memo has no particular official standing, nor does it claim to
represent more than the author's thinking at the time of writing.
Arkko Expires September 14, 2017 [Page 2]
Internet-Draft IASA 2.0 Thoughts March 2017
The authors's views on financing aspects have been discussed in
[I-D.arkko-ietf-finance-thoughts]. A collection of early views from
a community process on IASA issues has been published in
[I-D.hall-iasa20-workshops-report].
2. Changes, Challenges, and Opportunities
It is useful to understand the evolution of the IASA arrangements
over time. Leslie Daigle's memo discusses the changes from the
initial IASA arrangements to today [I-D.daigle-iasa-retrospective].
But it is also necessary to understand how far along we have come
from even the early 2000s. As Leslie's draft notes:
A first priority was to establish meeting dates, locations and
contracts more than a year in advance, to improve contract
negotiating positions, costs, and provide clarity for attendee
planning. (Historical data point: the early 2004 Seoul IETF
meeting did not have a hotel contract booked in December of 2003).
So, while there are a number of challenges, overall the system has
served the IETF well.
Section 5 of Leslie's draft covers some of issues:
o Do current arrangements match the tasks and organisation that have
grown larger?
o Today's IETF is international and diverse, which poses challenges
to meeting site selection.
o Too many sponsorship and other aspects of the organisation are
focused around the meetings.
o The line between IETF and ISOC organisation has not been clear-
cut, which has lead to issues around transparency, budgeting, and,
perhaps more importantly, clarity of control.
o The role of ISOC in representing IETF towards sponsors and donors
is sometimes unclear.
o Staffing that in practice extends beyond one employee, with
structure and control that was designed for one.
o IAOC membership is structurally challenged, with a significant
fraction of members having full-time IETF responsibilities
elsewhere.
Arkko Expires September 14, 2017 [Page 3]
Internet-Draft IASA 2.0 Thoughts March 2017
o The IAOC also has a limited ability to pick chairpersons, given
that some of the members are not eligible for being a chair.
o Community participation centers on meeting arrangements, with only
a small number of volunteers willing to be a part of the board.
In addition, there have been issues around transparency, particularly
relating to the meeting location selection process. A change in
spring 2016 led to the early release of cities under consideration,
to help spot potential issues early. However, other issues remain in
discussion, for instance relating to publishing future hotel
contracts.
There are also many issues that are not visible externally. For
instance, the IAOC is a board for oversight, but the lines between
oversight and execution are blurred. Particularly when staff is
overloaded. Almost anything that the board does needs staff
assistance, so any effort in helping move topics forward adds to the
overload situation. This situation is particlarly exacerbated when
something unexpected happens, such as was the case with the Zika-
virus concerns.
But many of the specific issues are by-products of the way that we
have structured the activities at IETF. Specifically, the author
believes that the following issues are root causes of many of the
difficulties:
Internal organisational structure
There is obviously a need for a central entity to keep the full
picture of budget and activities, but the current organisation was
designed at a time when we expected to have a board and one
administrative director. While the organisation has grown, and
for instance IAOC committees taking on more responsibility, we
still operate largely on this simple model but having to deal with
many more vendors and topics than before. The author's opinion is
that the IETF would benefit from looking at evolving the structure
and practices, for instance, relating to division and delegation
of responsibilities, and making the model less dependent on
a single director.
Bundling the IAOC with IETF Trust
While the IETF Trust has a budget and regularly deals with IETF
lawyer and the legal team, the schedule and nature of the work in
the Trust and the rest of the IASA is quite different. The
bundling of these organisations with the same members and same
meeting slots has hurt our ability to deal with both as
effectively as we should. And it certainly adds to the workload
Arkko Expires September 14, 2017 [Page 4]
Internet-Draft IASA 2.0 Thoughts March 2017
and volunteer problems. The Trust is a stable, long-term entity
that deals mostly with legal questions, and typically has low
workload. Trust decisions have a very long-lasting effect on
IETF, however. The IAOC deals with a large financial
responsibility, and is a more high-activity entity.
Expertise and willigness to work on administration
IETF participants are naturally more interested in technology
evolution than details of administration or meeting arrangements,
unless those arrangements lead to problems. While there are many
highly capable persons in the IETF, with a lot of experience of
managing budgets and contracts, it generally has not been easy to
find volunteers for IASA-related tasks.
This would point to a need to re-evaluate division of work between
volunteer boards and contracted, professional services.
Meeting planning processes
Another area where some re-thinking would be useful are the
meeting planning processes. Involving community earlier in the
location choices and writing a community-specified mandatory
requirements for meeting sites seem like obviously useful things,
but have started only recently, and have not yet found their
perfect forms.
Re-thinking what we as community do and how much we contract out
would also be useful here, of course as long as the community has
full visibility and ability to affect the decisions.
On a more practical level, a big fraction of the effort within the
IASA is spent on meeting arrangements. Community input indicates
that while some new locations are necessary, repeat visits are
desirable. Indeed, 5 out of 6 future meetings are to locations
that the IETF has been to recently (and that one new location was
the subject of much controversy).
Given the repetitive schedule, one would assume that this helps
meeting planning. While some groundwork (such as site visits) are
not unnecessarily repeated, and while contracts often have to
renegotiated, much of the rest of the process is run through as if
we were making completely independent decisions. This seems like
a missed opportunity for rationalisation, or further delegation to
vendors specialising in meeting organisation. Further use of
repeats with multi-meeting agreements would also seem to be
sensible.
Arkko Expires September 14, 2017 [Page 5]
Internet-Draft IASA 2.0 Thoughts March 2017
Note: no organisation can rely on a very small number of possible
meeting sites, due to the danger of becoming unable to attain
competitive pricing. So the pool of possible meeting sites has to
be still large enough, and be occasionally refreshed.
Further clarity of roles between the IETF and ISOC
The interface between the IETF and ISOC has evolved in natural
ways over the years. For instance, improvements in properly
accounting for in-kind contributions have made budgeting clearer.
And ISOC's support activities such as sponsorship acquisition are
obviously very important and useful for the IETF. Budgeting
clarity is only one part of an interface, however, and further
work is needed, for instance, in the area of how the different
support activities are managed. It might even be useful to
refactor the responsibilities between IETF and ISOC. As an
example, there's a very clear relationship between the IAOC and
the IAD, but it is less clear how ISOC and IETF co-operate in
managing a particular support activity.
3. Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Kathy Brown, Andrew Sullivan, Ray
Pelletier, Leslie Daigle, Alissa Cooper, Ted Hardie, Tobias Gondrom,
and Gonzalo Camarillo for interesting discussions in this space.
4. Informative References
[I-D.arkko-ietf-finance-thoughts]
Arkko, J., "Thoughts on IETF Finance Arrangements", draft-
arkko-ietf-finance-thoughts-00 (work in progress),
February 2017.
[I-D.daigle-iasa-retrospective]
Daigle, L., "After the first decade: IASA Retrospective",
draft-daigle-iasa-retrospective-00 (work in progress),
October 2016.
[I-D.hall-iasa20-workshops-report]
Hall, J. and J. Mahoney, "Report from the IASA 2.0 Virtual
Workshops", draft-hall-iasa20-workshops-report-00 (work in
progress), March 2017.
[IASA20] Arkko, J., "Proposed Project: IETF Administrative Support
2.0", November 2016 (https://www.ietf.org/blog/2016/11/
proposed-project-ietf-administrative-support-2-0/).
Arkko Expires September 14, 2017 [Page 6]
Internet-Draft IASA 2.0 Thoughts March 2017
[RFC3935] Alvestrand, H., "A Mission Statement for the IETF",
BCP 95, RFC 3935, DOI 10.17487/RFC3935, October 2004,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc3935>.
[RFC4071] Austein, R., Ed. and B. Wijnen, Ed., "Structure of the
IETF Administrative Support Activity (IASA)", BCP 101,
RFC 4071, DOI 10.17487/RFC4071, April 2005,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc4071>.
Author's Address
Jari Arkko
Ericsson
Kauniainen 02700
Finland
Email: jari.arkko@piuha.net
Arkko Expires September 14, 2017 [Page 7]
