2015-03-23 IETF
I am at the Internet Engineering Task Force meeting this week. The IETF is the primary organization that creates and publishes internet standards, such as HTTP for accessing web documents and for sending email. The IETF is an interesting group — as it doesn't have real membership, no voting, and all standards work is done voluntarily. All the published documents are freely available for individuals, companies, software developers, and hardware manufacturers to create solutions that will work with others. Computer scientists throughout the world have travelled to Dallas this week to improve the internet's security and efficiency.
I am joining sessions about Scalable DNS Service Discovery, DNS PRIVate Exchange, Home Networking, Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Domain Name System Operations, DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE), Sunsetting IPv4, Dynamic Host Configuration, and maybe more.
The volunteer process of the entire effort that results in a better internet amazes me. While governments and companies may mandate some technologies, it is interesting that these core technologies are voluntarily created and voluntarily used. Another book idea?