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<ed. where I use "TAO" below, you might want to use "Tao" in italics>
N-1-3-040.51, The IETF Users' Guide, by Gary Scott Malkin*,
<gmalkin@xylogics.com>
The last two years has seen an explosive growth in attendance at
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meetings. In July, 1990, the
IETF met in Vancouver, British Columbia with 300 people in attendance.
The most recent meeting, in July, 1992, met in Boston, Massachusetts
and boasted 675 attendees. Growth has not been limited to just
attendance. For example, the number of working groups (WG) within the
IETF has risen from 38 to 46 within that same timeframe. Another
growth indicator is the official recognition of the Birds of a Feather
(BOF) groups, which were only informal gatherings until the December,
1990 IETF meeting in Boulder, Colorado. There were 20 BOFs at the
Boston meeting this year. To top it all off, the number of WG/BOF
sessions went from 49 in Vancouver, to over 100 in Boston.
All of these statistics are meant to show the wealth of information an
IETF newcomer has to absorb. Approximately 35% of the attendees at
any given meeting are first timers. It is obvious, therefore, that
there is a need for an IETF Users' Guide. This document would provide
newcomers with the information they would need to acclimate themselves
prior to their first IETF. In this way, they would be able to get
more out of the meeting and, hopefully, contribute more.
A document is currently being written within the User Services Area of
the IETF to create an IETF User's Guide called, "The Tao of IETF".
TAO is broken into three general sections: fun stuff, "required
reading" stuff and reference stuff ("stuff" is the term actually used
in the document, and should provide an idea of the document's flavor).
The first section addresses the history of the IETF and how it has
grown over the past six years, emphasizing some important milestones.
There is a description of the hierarchy in which the IETF resides.
This section also overviews the IETF mailing list and meeting
registration activities. The remainder of the section is devoted to
describing life at an IETF meeting.
The second section provides additional detailed information on the
registration process, IETF mailing lists, and IETF proceedings. It
also points out ways to make attendance more effective. There are
descriptions of the Request For Comments (RFC) and Internet-Draft
documents and pointers to other informative documents. The remainder
of the section is a list of Frequently Asked Questions, complete with
answers.
The third section is mainly an acronym list. It also contains the
references and the Author's address.
TAO will be pointed to in the IETF meeting announcements. In addition
to residing in the RFC archives, it will also be in the IETF
informational documents archives.
*Principal Software Engineer, Xylogics