IAB Business Meeting, 2015-07-20, Prague, Czech Republic

Present:

• Lars Eggert (IRTF Chair)
• Ted Hardie
• Joe Hildebrand
• Russ Housley
• Cindy Morgan (IAB Executive Administrative Manager)
• Erik Nordmark
• Robert Sparks
• Andrew Sullivan (IAB Chair)
• Dave Thaler
• Brian Trammell
• Suzanne Woolf

Regrets:

• Jari Arkko
• Alia Atlas (IESG Liaison)
• Mary Barnes
• Marc Blanchet
• Ralph Droms
• Heather Flanagan (RFC Editor Liaison)
• Mat Ford (ISOC Liaison)

1. Program Scope

The IAB continued its discussion on how to distinguish IAB Program work from work done in IETF Working Groups and IRTF Research Groups (see minutes of 19 July 2015 for previous discussion).

There is confusion on this issue as it relates to the work on IP Stack Evolution. The Session Protocol for User Datagrams (SPUD) BOF was held at IETF 92, and afterwards, the BOF mailing list and “SPUD” acronym continued to be used for discussions on that topic. Other discussions happened in parallel on the IP Stack Evolution Program mailing list, but since that is a closed list, there is a perceived lack of transparency. In addition, a smaller group of people is working on a “SPUD” prototype to use to help lay out the architecture.

The IAB agreed that sorting out which mailing lists are appropriate to use would clear up some of the confusion. Brian Trammell will send a message to the spud@ietf.org and stackevo@ietf.org mailing lists inviting people to join the new, open stackevo-discuss@iab.org mailing list to discuss efforts to evolve the stack in and around the transport layer.

As to the question of Program output versus Working Group output, Suzanne Woolf noted that Program work is intended to provide input to future potential IETF work. Ted Hardie added the Working Group output should be sufficiently concrete that one can build interoperable things; the Program output should be abstract enough that one can build multiple things in order to better understand the principles constraining the solution set.

The IAB agreed that:

• IAB organizes long-term work into programs
• IAB architecture programs try to answer, “What principles guide work in the program’s area?”
• Once those principles are clear
  • the IETF might hold a BoF and charter a WG
  • the IRTF might charter a research group
  • someone might take the work somewhere else
  • people might figure the problem isn’t interesting