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Liaison Coordination

The IAB acts as representative of the interests of the IETF and the Internet Society in technical liaison relationships with other organizations concerned with standards and other technical and organizational issues relevant to the world-wide Internet.

The IETF has a number of formal liaison relationships with other organizations. These liaison relationships are established by the IAB when conditions warrant appointing a specific person to manage the inter-organization coordination. If you have any questions about liaison management including sending and receiving liaison statements with or without an established liaison relationship, you can send email to the IAB liaison coordinators at liaison-coordination@iab.org. The current liaison coordinators are Wes Hardaker, Suresh Krishnan, and Tommy Pauly.

It should be noted that the number of formal liaison relationships is somewhat small, as the best way for most organizations to work with the IETF is to do so through direct technical, informal collaboration in IETF working groups.

Once the liaison relationship is established, the IAB appoints a liaison manager to act as the IETF-side point of contact. A list of the current IETF liaison relationships, and their corresponding IETF manager, can be found on the IETF website Liaisons page.

For more information about the procedures that govern IETF liaisons, please see RFC 4052 “IAB Liaison Management” and RFC 4053 (BCP 103) “Procedures for Handling Liaison Statements to and from the IETF.”

Most communication occurs between the IETF liaison manager and the partner organization directly, through the Liaison Statement tool, with the IAB performing only an oversight function. Occasionally correspondence is directed to, or sent by, the IAB itself.

Some IETF liaison managers send reports to the IAB for publication to the wider community. More recently, reports from liaison managers have been included in the IAB meeting minutes.