Internet DRAFT - draft-iab-aid-workshop
draft-iab-aid-workshop
Network Working Group N. ten Oever
Internet-Draft University of Amsterdam
Intended status: Informational C. Cath
Expires: 1 December 2022
M. Kühlewind
Ericsson
C. S. Perkins
University of Glasgow
30 May 2022
Report from the IAB Workshop on Analyzing IETF Data (AID), 2021
draft-iab-aid-workshop-01
Abstract
The 'Show me the numbers: Workshop on Analyzing IETF Data (AID)' was
convened by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) from November 29 to
December 2 and hosted by the IN-SIGHT.it project at the University of
Amsterdam, however, converted to an online only event. The workshop
was conducted based on two discussion parts and a hackathon activity
in between. This report summarizes the workshop's discussion and
identifies topics that warrant future work and consideration.
Note that this document is a report on the proceedings of the
workshop. The views and positions documented in this report are
those of the workshop participants and do not necessarily reflect IAB
views and positions.
Discussion Venues
This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.
Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at
https://github.com/intarchboard/workshop-aid.
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 https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
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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 1 December 2022.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Workshop Scope and Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.1. Tools, data, and methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2.2. Observations on affiliation and industry control . . . . 4
2.3. Community and diversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.4. Publications, process, and decision-making . . . . . . . 6
2.5. Environmental Sustainability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
3. Hackathon Report . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4. Position Papers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4.1. Tools, data, and methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4.2. Observations on affiliation and industry control . . . . 8
4.3. Community and diversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
4.4. Publications, process, and decision-making . . . . . . . 9
4.5. Environmental Sustainability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
5. Workshop participants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
6. Program Committee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
7. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
8. Annexes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
8.1. Annex 1 - Data Taxonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
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1. Introduction
The IETF, as an international Standards Developing Organization
(SDO), hosts a diverse set of data including on the organization's
history, development, and current standardization activities,
including of Internet protocols and its institutions. A large
portion of this data is publicly available, yet it is underutilized
as a tool to inform the work in the IETF proper or the broader
research community focused on topics like Internet governance and
trends in ICT standard-setting.
The aim of the IAB Workshop on Analyzing IETF Data (AID) 2021 was to
study how IETF data is currently used, understand what insights can
be drawn from that data, and to explore open questions around how
that data may be further used in future.
These questions can inform a research agenda drawing from IETF data,
that fosters further collaborative work among interested parties,
ranging from academia and civil society to industry and IETF
leadership.
2. Workshop Scope and Discussion
The workshop was organized with two all-group discussion slots at the
beginning and the end of the workshop. In between the workshop
participants organized hacakthon activities, based on topics
identifed during the initial discussion and submitted position
papers. The follow topic areas have been identified and discussed.
2.1. Tools, data, and methods
The IETF holds a wide range of data sources. The main ones used are
the mailinglist archives (https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/), RFCs
(https://www.ietf.org/standards/rfcs/), and the datatracker
(https://datatracker.ietf.org/). The latter provides information on
participants, authors, meeting proceedings, minutes and more
(https://notes.ietf.org/iab-aid-datatracker-database-overview#).
Furthermore there are statistics for the IETF websites
(https://www.ietf.org/policies/web-analytics/), working group Github
repositories, IETF survey data (https://www.ietf.org/blog/ietf-
community-survey-2021/) and there was discussion about the utility of
download statistics for the RFCs itself from different repos.
There are a wide range of tools to analyze this data, produced by
IETF participants or researchers interestested in the work of the
IETF. Two projects that presented their work at the workshop were
BigBang (https://bigbang-py.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) and
Sodestream's IETFdata (https://github.com/glasgow-ipl/ietfdata)
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library; the RFC Prolog Database was described in a submitted paper
(see Section Section 4 below). These projects could be used to add
additional insights to the existing IETF statistics
(https://www.arkko.com/tools/docstats.html) page and the datatracker
statistics (https://datatracker.ietf.org/stats/), e.g., related to
gender questions, however, privacy issues andd implication of making
such data publicly available were discussed as well.
The datatracker itself is a community tool that welcomes
contributions, e.g. for additions to the existing interfaces or the
statistics page directly (see https://notes.ietf.org/iab-aid-
datatracker-database-overview (https://notes.ietf.org/iab-aid-
datatracker-database-overview)). Instructions how to set up a local
development environment can be found, at the time of the workshop, at
https://notes.ietf.org/iab-aid-data-resources
(https://notes.ietf.org/iab-aid-data-resources). Questions or any
discussion can be issued to tools-discuss@ietf.org.
2.2. Observations on affiliation and industry control
A large portion of the submitted position papers indicated interest
in researching questions about industry control in the
standardization process (vs. individual contributions in personal
capacity), where industry control covers both, technical contribution
and the ability to successfully standardize these contribution as
well as competition on leadership roles. To assess these question it
has ben discussed to investigate participant's affiliations including
"indirect" affiliation e.g. by funding and changes in affiliation as
well as the nessecarity to model company characteristics or
stakeholder groups.
Discussions about the analysis of IETF data shows that affiliation
dynamics are hard to capture, due to the specifics of how the data is
entered but also because of larger social dynamics. On the side of
IETF data capture, affiliation is an open text field, which causes
people to write their affiliation down in different ways
(capitilization, space, word seperation, etc). A common data format
could contribute to analyses that compare SDO performance and
behavior of actors inside and across standards bodies. To help this
a draft data model has been developed during hackathon portion of the
workshop which can found as Annex 1 - Data Taxonomy.
Furthermore, there is the issue of mergers and acquisitions and
subsidiary companies. There is no authorotative exogenous source of
variation for affiliation changes, so hand-collected and curated data
is used to analyze changes in affiliation over time. While this
approach is imperfect, conclusions can be drawn from the data. For
example, in the case of mergers or acquisition where a small
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organizations joins a large organization, this results in a
statistically significant increase in liklihood of an individual
being put in a working group chair position (see BaronKanevskaia
(https://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-uploads/2021/11/Baron.pdf)).
2.3. Community and diversity
High interest from the workshop participants was also on using
existing data to better understand who the current IETF community is,
especially in terms of diversity, and how to potentially increase
diversity and thereby inclusivity, e.g. understanding if are there
certain groups or lists that "drive people away" and why.
Inclusivity and transparency about the standardization process are
generally important to keep the Internet and its development process
viable. As commented during the workshop discussion, when measuring
and evaluating different angles of diversity it is also important to
understand the actual goals that are intended when increasing
diversity, e.g. in order to increase competence (mainly technical
diversity from different companies and stakeholder groups) or
relevance (also regional diversity and international footprint).
The discussion on community and diversity spanned from methods that
draw from novel text mining, time series clustering, graph mining and
psycholinguistic approaches to understand the consensus mechanism to
more speculative approaches about what it would take to build a
feminist Internet. The discussion also covered the data needed to
measure who is in the community and how diverse it is.
The discussion highlighted that part of the challenge is defining
what diversity means, how to measure it, or as one participant
highlighted to define "who the average IETF is". The question was
also raised what to do about missing data or non-participating or
underrepresented communities, like women, individuals from the
African continent and network operators. In terms of how IETF data
is structured, various researchers mentioned that it is hard track
conversations as mail threads, split, merge and change. The ICANN-
at-large model came up as an example of how to involve relevant
stakeholders in the IETF that are currently not present. Vice versa,
it is also interesting for outside communities (especially policy
makers) to get a sense of who the IETF community is and keep them
updated.
The human element of the community and diversity was stressed, in
order to understand the IETF community's diversity it is important to
talk to people (beyond text analysis) and in order to ensure
inclusivity individual participants must make an effort to, as one
participant recounted, tell them their participation is valuable.
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2.4. Publications, process, and decision-making
A number of submissions focussed on the RFC publication process, on
the development of standards and other RFCs in the IETF, and on how
the IETF makes decisions. This included work on both technical
decisions about the content of the standards, but also procedural and
process decisions, and questions around how we can understand, model,
and perhaps improve the standards process. Some of the work
considered what makes a successful RFC, how are RFCs used and
referenced, and what we can learn about importance of a topic by
studying the RFCs, drafts, and email discussion.
There were three sets of questions to consider in this area. The
first related to success and failure of standards, and considered
what makes a successful/good RFC? What makes the process of RFC
making successful? And how are RFCs used and referenced once
published? Discussion considered how to better understand the path
from an internet draft to an RFC, to see if there are specific
factors that lead to successful development of a draft into an RFC.
Participants explored the extent to which this depends on the
seniority and experience of the authors, on the topic and IETF area,
extent and scope of mailing list discussion, and other factors, to
understand whether success of a draft can be predicted, and whether
interventions can be developed to increase the likelihood of success
for work.
The second question was around decision making. How does the IETF
make design decisions? What are the bottlenecks in effective
decision making? When is a decision made? And what is the decision?
Difficulties here lie in capturing decisions and the results of
consensus calls early in the process, and understanding the factors
that lead to effective decision making.
Finally, there were questions around what can be learn about
protocols by studying IETF publications, processes, and decision
making? For example, are there insights to be gained around how
security concerns are discussed and considered in the development of
standards? Is it possible to verify correctness of protocols and/or
detect ambiguities? What can be learnt by extracting insights from
implementations and activities on implementation efforts?
Answers to these questions come from analysis of IETF emails, RFCs
and Internet-Drafts, meeting minutes, recordings, Github data, and
external data such as surveys, etc.
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2.5. Environmental Sustainability
The final discussion session considered environmental sustainability.
It discussed what is the IETF's role with respect to climate change
both in terms on what is the environmental impact of the way the IETF
develops standards, and in terms of what is the environmental impact
of the standards the IETF develops?
Discussion started by considering how sustainable are IETF meetings,
focussing on how much CO2 emissions are IETF meetings responsible for
and how can we make the IETF more sustainable. Analysis looked at
the home locations of participants, meeting locations, and carbon
footprint of air travel and remote attendance, to estimate the carbon
costs of an IETF meeting. Initial results suggest that the costs of
holding multiple in-person IETF meetings per year are likely
unsustainable in terms of carbon emission, although the analysis is
ongoing.
Discussion also considered to what extent are climate impacts
considered in the development and standardization of Internet
protocols? It reviewed the text of RFCs and active working group
drafts, looking for relevant keywords to highlight the extent to
which climate change, energy efficiency, and related topics are
considered in the design of Internet protocols, to show the limited
extent to which these topics have been considered. Ongoing work is
considering meeting minutes and mail archives, to get a fuller
picture, but initial results show only limited consideration of these
important issues.
3. Hackathon Report
The middle two days of the workshop were organized as a hackathon.
The aims of the hackathon were to 1) acquaint people with the
different data sources and analysis methods, 2) seek to answer some
of the questions that came up during presentations on the first day
of the workshop, 3) foster collaboration among researchers to grow a
community of IETF data researchers.
At the end of Day 1, the plenary presentation day, people were
invited to divide themselves in groups who selected their own
respective facilitators. All groups had their own work space and
could use their own communication methods and channels, or use IETF's
gather.town. Furthermore, daily check-ins were organized during the
two hackathon days. At the final day the hackathon groups presented
their work in a plenary session.
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The objectives of the hackathon, according to the co-chairs, have
been met, and the output significantly exceeded expectations. It
allowed for more interaction then academic conferences and produced
some actual research results by people who had not collaborated
before the workshop.
Future workshops that choose to integrate a hackathon could consider
to ask participants to submit groups, issues, and questions
beforehand (potentially as part of the positions paper or the sign-up
process) to facilitate the formation of groups.
4. Position Papers
4.1. Tools, data, and methods
Sebastian Benthall Using Complex Systems Analysis to Identify
Organizational Interventions (https://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-
uploads/2021/11/Benthall.pdf)
Stephen McQuistin, Colin Perkins The ietfdata Library
(https://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-uploads/2021/11/McQuistin.pdf)
Marc Petit-Huguenin The RFC Prolog Database (https://www.iab.org/wp-
content/IAB-uploads/2021/11/Petit-Huguenin.txt)
Jari Arkko Observations about IETF process measurements
(https://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-uploads/2021/11/Arkko.pdf)
4.2. Observations on affiliation and industry control
Justus Baron, Olia Kanevskaia Competition for Leadership Positions in
Standards Development Organizations (https://www.iab.org/wp-content/
IAB-uploads/2021/11/Baron.pdf)
Nick Doty Analyzing IETF Data: Changing affiliations
(https://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-uploads/2021/11/Doty.pdf)
Don Le Position Paper (https://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-
uploads/2021/11/Le.pdf)
Elizaveta Yachmeneva Research Proposal (https://www.iab.org/wp-
content/IAB-uploads/2021/11/Yachmeneva.pdf)
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4.3. Community and diversity
Priyanka Sinha, Michael Ackermann, Pabitra Mitra, Arvind Singh, Amit
Kumar Agrawal Characterizing the IETF through its consensus
mechanisms (https://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-uploads/2021/11/
Sinha.pdf)
Mallory Knodel Would feminists have built a better internet?
(https://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-uploads/2021/11/Knodel.pdf)
Wes Hardaker, Genevieve Bartlett Identifying temporal trends in IETF
participation (https://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-uploads/2021/11/
Hardaker.pdf)
Lars Eggert Who is the Average IETF Participant?
(https://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-uploads/2021/11/Eggert.pdf)
Emanuele Tarantino, Justus Baron, Bernhard Ganglmair, Nicola Persico,
Timothy Simcoe Representation is Not Sufficient for Selecting Gender
Diversity (https://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-uploads/2021/11/
Tarantino.pdf)
4.4. Publications, process, and decision-making
Michael Welzl, Carsten Griwodz, Safiqul Islam Understanding Internet
Protocol Design Decisions (https://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-
uploads/2021/11/Welzl.pdf)
Ignacio Castro et al Characterising the IETF through the lens of RFC
deployment (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3487552.3487821)
Carsten Griwodz, Safiqul Islam, Michael Welzl The Impact of
Continuity (https://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-uploads/2021/11/
Griwodz.pdf)
Paul Hoffman RFCs Change (https://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-
uploads/2021/11/Hoffman.pdf)
Xue Li, Sara Magliacane, Paul Groth The Challenges of Cross-Document
Coreference Resolution in Email (https://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-
uploads/2021/11/Groth.pdf)
Amelia Andersdotter Project in time series analysis: e-mailing lists
(https://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-uploads/2021/11/Andersdotter.pdf)
Mark McFadden Position Paper (https://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-
uploads/2021/11/McFadden.pdf)
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4.5. Environmental Sustainability
Christoph Becker Towards Environmental Sustainability with the IETF
(https://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-uploads/2021/11/Becker.pdf)
Daniel Migault CO2eq: Estimating Meetings' Air Flight CO2 Equivalent
Emissions: An Illustrative Example with IETF meetings
(https://www.iab.org/wp-content/IAB-uploads/2021/11/Migault.pdf)
5. Workshop participants
Bernhard Ganglmair, Carsten Griwodz, Christoph Becker, Colin Perkins,
Corinne Cath, Daniel Migault, Don Le, Effy Xue Li, Elizaveta
Yachmeneva, Francois Ortolan, Greg Wood, Ignacio Castro, Jari Arkko,
Justus Baron, Karen O'Donoghue, Lars Eggert, Mallory Knodel, Marc
Petit-Huguenin, Mark McFadden, Michael Welzl, Mirja Kuehlewind, Nick
Doty, Niels ten Oever, Priyanka Sinha, Safiqul Islam, Sebastian
Benthall, Stephen McQuistin, Wes Hardaker, and Zhenbin Li.
6. Program Committee
The workshop Program Committee members were Niels ten Oever (chair,
University of Amsterdam), Colin Perkins (chair, IRTF, University of
Glasgow), Corinne Cath (chair, Oxford Internet Institute), Mirja
Kuehlewind (IAB, Ericsson), Zhenbin Li (IAB, Huawei), and Wes
Hardaker (IAB, USC/ISI).
7. Acknowledgments
The Program Committee wishes to extend its thanks to Cindy Morgan for
logistics support and to Kate Pundyk for notetaking.
Efforts put in this workshop by Niels ten Oever was made possible
through funding from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) through grant
MVI.19.032 as part of the programme 'Maatschappelijk Verantwoord
Innoveren (MVI)'.
We would like to thank the Ford Foundation for their support that
made participation of Corinne Cath, Kate Pundyk, and Mallory Knodel
possible (grant number, 136179, 2020).
Efforts in the organization of this workshop by Niels ten Oever were
supported in part by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences
Research Council under grant EP/S036075/1.
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8. Annexes
8.1. Annex 1 - Data Taxonomy
A Draft Data Taxonomy for SDO Data:
Organization:
Organization Subsidiary
Time
Email domain
Website domain
Size
Revenue, annual
Number of employees
Org - Affiliation Category (Labels) ; 1 : N
Association
Advertising Company
Chipmaker
Content Distribution Network
Content Providers
Consulting
Cloud Provider
Cybersecurity
Financial Institution
Hardware vendor
Internet Registry
Infrastructure Company
Networking Equipment Vendor
Network Service Provider
Regional Standards Body
Regulatory Body
Research and Development Institution
Software Provider
Testing and Certification
Telecommunications Provider
Satellite Operator
Org - Stakeholder Group : 1 - 1
Academia
Civil Society
Private Sector -- including industry consortia and associations; state-owned and government-funded businesses
Government
Technical Community (IETF, ICANN, ETSI, 3GPP, oneM2M, etc)
Intergovernmental organization
SDO:
Membership Types (SDO)
Members (Organizations for some, individuals for others…)
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Membership organization
Regional SDO
ARIB
ATIS
CCSA
ETSI
TSDSI
TTA
TTC
Consortia
Country of Origin:
Country Code
Number of Participants
Patents
Organization
Authors - 1 : N - Persons/Participants
Time
Region
Patent Pool
Standard Essential Patent
If so, for which standard
Participant (An individual person)
Name
1: N - Emails
Time start / time end
1 : N : Affiliation
Organization
Position
Time start / end
1 : N : Affiliation - SDO
Position
SDO
Time
Email Domain (personal domain)
(Contribution data is in other tables)
Document
Status of Document
Internet Draft
Work Item
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Standard
Author -
Name
Affiliation - Organization
Person/Participant
(Affiliation from Authors only?)
Data Source - Provenance for any data imported from an external data set
Meeting
Time
Place
Agenda
Registrations
Name
Email
Affiliation
Authors' Addresses
Niels ten Oever
University of Amsterdam
Email: mail@nielstenoever.net
Corinne Cath
Email: corinnecath@gmail.com
Mirja Kühlewind
Ericsson
Email: mirja.kuehlewind@ericsson.com
Colin Perkins
University of Glasgow
Email: csp@csperkins.org
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