Introduction

This document serves as an aid for people who are observing the work in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) from a policy-based perspective. We have tried to indicate which activities might be of policy interest.

This is not the only curated list for people with other than technical interest of IETF activity. Article 19 produced a web page with an overview of working groups whose work that has human right considerations. Also, the IETF itself publishes lists of new topics at IETF meetings through its blog article: Suggested IETF 124 Sessions for Getting Familiar with New Topics.

Curation

The information in this document is curated. The editor has made a rather subjective interpretation about what work might have public policy aspects.

Oftentimes work in the IETF may not have immediate impact on public policy. In fact, given the building block nature of IETF specification the effect of those building blocks may only be obvious after they have been deployed on the Internet as part of bigger systems or services. That makes identification of potential public policy impact harder.

Our approach is as follows:

• In this document we include all BoFs that are organized for a certain meeting. Even though a BoF may not trigger any of the criteria loosely described in the previous paragraph, they are good meetings to see any issues surface.
• We add an enumeration of new working groups since the last meeting. With a short description or a link to elsewhere in the document.
• For all other we include a mention in a group if public policy aspects are obvious from the initial description of the work. Additionally, we include groups where we perceive a change in control or business relations, where visibility in certain aspects of Internet traffic change. This part of the curation is more intuitive and subjective.

Working groups that are clearly technical building blocks and do not have any identifiable public policy angles are not mentioned. For the working groups that are mentioned we have tried to indicate, with the keywords, where public policy issues might arise - if only during the use of the technical building blocks when designing and implementing systems.

This document is a living document. We try to update the information shortly before an IETF meeting, but may push new versions in between meetings too.

Recent Changes

This version of the Ornithology has been updated for IETF 124. Times are indicative only. Verify time slots of interest using the IETF meeting agenda.

We have added a line for each group on why we believe the group has potential public policy interests.

We removed HAPPY from the curation, since we found it difficult to argue it has potential policy interest.