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Message from the IETF Chair

By: Russ Housley

Date: October 1, 2010

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The work of the IETF remains relevant and energetic!

IETF 78 was held in Maastricht, Netherlands. It was a very successful meeting, attended by 1,153 people from 53 different countries. While many attendees experienced travel difficulties, once they arrived everyone worked enthusiastically on their IETF activities. Significant progress was made by many working groups (WGs), and it was a genuine pleasure to see so many talented and engaged people collaborating.

SIDN, which served as a very accommodating host, coordinated with eight sponsors to provide an effective meeting venue. In addition, Gemeente Maastricht, the Ministry of Economic Affairs, and Provincie Limburg worked with SIDN to create a wonderful social event on the waterfront, and SURFnet sponsored the network connectivity.

Since IETF 77, six new WGs have been chartered and three WGs were closed. There are 122 chartered WGs. Between meetings, the WGs and their individual contributors produced 467 new Internet-Drafts and updated 1,069 existing Internet-Drafts, some of the drafts more than once. The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) approved 106 Internet-Drafts for publication as RFCs. The RFC Editor published 120 new RFCs.

During the plenary session on Wednesday evening, the IETF celebrated the signing of the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) root. The root zone is signed, as are the .org, the ietf.org, and the iab.org domains. While the names of all of the people who contributed to the DNSSEC effort scrolled on the screen, wine was passed around at the plenary session, and we toasted the universal deployment of DNSSEC.

Let’s all work toward the same milestone for IPv6 deployment soon. I’m looking forward to a similar toast at a future plenary.

A new nominations committee (NomCom) has been seated, and the members are working to select the leaders who will begin their terms at the March 2011 IETF meeting. Please help the NomCom identify great leaders for the community.

IETF 79 will take place Beijing on 7–12 November 2010 and will be hosted by Tsinghua University. Scheduling information for upcoming IETF meetings can be found, as always, athttp://www.ietf.org/meetings/meetings.html. I look forward to seeing you in Beijing.

This article was posted on 31 January 2011