IETF
Discussion
Lee Fleming on IETF Governance
Fleming:
“Although strictly speaking the IETF is an open standards rather than an open source community, it nevertheless exhibits critical open innovation community features in that any individual can volunteer to participate, proceedings remain transparent, and all technology originated therein is made available for free (Bradner 1999). The IETF is also the most long lived of the well-known open innovation communities and arguably exerts the greatest social and economic impact because of its association with the Internet. Of its potential as a model for open innovation communities Bradner (1999, pp. 47 and 52) reports that:
IETF standards are developed in an open, all-inclusive process in which any interested individual can participate. All IETF documents are freely available over the Internet and can be reproduced at will. In fact the IETF’s open document process is a case study in the potential of the Open Source movement _ _ _ _ The IETF supported the concept of open sources long before the Open Source movement was formed.
The IETF emerged in 1986 from an amalgam of ad hoc
Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration
(DARPA) committees and has no official mandate to
govern Internet technology. Challenged by more traditional
standards-developing organizations and even
government bodies, it has nonetheless emerged as the
de facto standards-developing organization for the Internet
(Abbate 1999, Mowery and Simcoe 2002; see also
Harris 2001; Bradner 1996, 1998; and Hoffman and
Bradner 2002 for insiders’ descriptions). The IETF
develops and maintains the core Internet standard,
TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol),
as well as many other standards that are pervasive
in modern computing and networking but largely invisible
to the average user. Although much of the communication
and work of the IETF is conducted via electronic
media, members meet three times a year, carrying forward
a tradition begun in January 1986 when 21 IETFers
met for the first time in San Diego. Membership
remains open to all comers and has continued to grow,
with as many as 2,800 individuals attending meetings
and thousands more interacting online. Members participate
in the IETF at least nominally as individuals
(Bradner 1999), although they typically work for firms,
universities, or governments. There being no dues or
membership lists, in principle any person can join the
IETF.
The IETF accomplishes most of its work within aptly named working groups (WGs) organized under larger functional areas. Individuals can freely associate, virtually or physically, with any of the extant technical working groups. Groups and their leaders seek and, if successful, are granted charters to address specific technical problems within a delimited time and domain. The Secure Shell Group, for example, was chartered to update and standardize the popular SSH protocol (Secure Shell secsh 2003). Working groups have chairs as well as individuals or design teams charged to produce documents that detail proposed standards. Area directors (ADs) appoint working group chairs. A nominating committee (NOMCON), randomly selected from community members who have attended at least two IETF meetings in the past two years, appoints ADs (generally two for each area).
The first stage in group formation entails soliciting BOF participation via electronic invitations disseminated to the IETF mailing list. Organizers who generate favorable sign-up response receive physical meeting space at the next IETF conference. If a meeting is well attended and elicits broad interest, an AD will charter a group and appoint a chair. The chair is generally, but not always, the BOF organizer. Appointment can thus be construed as confirmation of initially successful leadership and a vote of confidence by community members and current leaders in the individual’s leadership potential." (http://orgsci.highwire.org/cgi/content/abstract/18/2/165)
Source
Article: Brokerage, Boundary Spanning, and Leadership in Open Innovation Communities. By Lee Fleming (Harvard Business School), David M. Waguespack (University of Maryland)
URL = http://orgsci.highwire.org/cgi/content/abstract/18/2/165