The
Internet Engineering Task Force (
IETF) develops and promotes
Internet standards, cooperating closely with the
W3C and
ISO/
IEC standard bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the
TCP/IP and
Internet protocol suite. It is an open
standards organization, with no formal membership or membership requirements. All participants and managers are volunteers, though their work is usually funded by their employers or sponsors; for instance, the current chairperson is funded by
VeriSign and the U.S. government's
National Security Agency.
[1]The IETF is organized into a large number of working groups and informal discussion groups (BoF)s, each dealing with a specific topic. Each group is intended to complete work on that topic and then disband. Each working group has an appointed chairperson (or sometimes several co-chairs), along with a charter that describes its focus, and what and when it is expected to produce.
The working groups are organized into areas by subject matter. Current areas include Applications, General, Internet, Operations and Management, Real-time Applications and Infrastructure, Routing, Security, and Transport. Each area is overseen by an area director (AD), with most areas having two co-ADs. The ADs are responsible for appointing working group chairs. The area directors, together with the IETF Chair, form the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), which is responsible for the overall operation of the IETF.
The IETF is formally a part of the Internet Society. The IETF is overseen by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), which oversees its external relationships, and relations with the RFC Editor. The IAB is also jointly responsible for the IETF Administrative Oversight Committee (IAOC), which oversees the IETF Administrative Support Activity (IASA), which provides logistical, etc support for the IETF. The IAB also manages the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), with which the IETF has a number of cross-group relations.
