History of IAB Programs

Traditionally the IAB has taken an interest in a number of architectural areas. Among the architectural areas, in no particular order:

• IPv6 and its adoption and transitional coexistence with IPv4 given the realities of an IPv4-dominated Internet;
• DNS health and security;
• Web security;
• The realities of maintaining the end-to-end and layered architecture;
• Prevention of unwanted traffic;
• The security and stability of the routing system; and
• Internationalization of the Internet and balance with localization and retention of a global network.

These are some areas that require long-term perspective and may involve various activities and deliverables. For instance, such complex areas may require a separate activity for scoping the work (BOFs, presentations, position papers), progressing the work, or stimulating the charter development of new work in the IETF. Such effort may further involve collaboration with other organizations.

The IAB started organizing the work in such areas in the form of programs to enable long-term activities scoped and managed by the IAB, although for the actual work, the IAB may form a team with the specific expertise needed for the activity, which may not be within the IAB. Structuring work in this way has several objectives:

• minimize dependency on the current IAB composition and specific expertise and competencies of its members;
• minimize dependency on the tenure of IAB members;
• increase bandwidth by shifting responsibilities of IAB members from doing the actual work to organizing and delegating work, and providing guidance;
• shift the IAB focus from the specifics of an activity to the development of the vision and maintenance of the big picture, to selecting priority areas and carrying out respective efforts.
• improve visibility of the activities the IAB is busy with and provide an opportunity to the community to provide feedback on the content and priority of specific activities.

However, some of the programs were mostly administrative (e.g., the liaison oversight program, the IANA program, plenary planning program, and also the RSOC), while others were more focused on technical aspects, such as privsec and StackEvo in the past and then e.g. model-t.

In the past IAB programs were (mostly) by-invitation closed groups that often used closed mailing lists to do the meat of their work. Membership was managed by the program lead, mostly on an ad-hoc basis. Even though more open per-program mailing lists existed, many active program participants were unaware of their existence and they were not used. This led to a situation where many IETF participants were entirely unaware of the existence of technical IAB programs, nor able to contribute. More recently, the IAB has opened up participation in IAB programs to gather wider input, such as in the case of the recently created e-impact program.

In 2020, the IAB further refined the process of establishing and managing programs and thereby realized a need to distinguish Technical Programs from Administrative Support Groups.