Subject: [Gendispatch] RFC 2028

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2021 19:34:08 -0500

Hi.

In conjunction with another effort, I've had occasion to review
RFC 2028, "The Organizations Involved in the IETF Standards
Process".  With the passage of time, it is in really, seriously
bad shape, having been, AFAICT, updated since October 1996 only
for IPR-related issues and the IETF Administration LLC
terminology change.  It points (normatively in terms of use in
the text) to a copy of documents as Work in Progress, neither of
which has ever been published under that name.   It still claims
the IETF Chair is appointed by the IAB.  While RFC 8717 (for
which I'm the guilty party) made the Executive Director update,
it points to 8711 for details that aren't really there and it is
not clear to me whether we really intended the Secretariat,
rather than the LLC to be "responsible for maintaining the
formal public record of the Internet standards process".   There
are also many other errors due to the world changing and passing
it by.

Unlike the changes for the LLC, fixing 2028 is not going to be
mostly a trivial substitution process.  There are many things
that just need to be corrected and hence should not be
controversial but a few that will require decisions that may not
easily get consensus.

Anyway, while I don't think I want to volunteer to lead such an
effort, I'd like to put "figure out how to revise, update, and
likely replace RFC 2028" on the agenda because the document, in
its current state, is periodically cited as a key process BCP
and it rather badly represents the current IETF.

     john