The Evolution of IETF Standards and their Production

This paper reports the results of an exploratory study on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) specifications corpus in relation to the changes in volume, structure, and production of Internet standards. Using data spanning three decades, the authors examine changes in the production volume and type composition of IETF documents, their interdependency, and the level of collaboration involved in their production. Longitudinal changes in the standards corpus exhibit an increasing trend in interdependency, number of refinement steps, and number of authors, and additionally reveal that standards production is of an episodic nature with regular peaks in output volume. Complementary analysis on the network structure of dependencies highlights a trend toward compartmentalization of the system over the years involving the emergence of relatively isolated subsystems of related standards. The authors suggest that a perspective which considers a system like IETF as an organization itself, rather than a constellation of extra-organizational activities, is needed to understand and manage standardization processes like this one. Copyright © 2012, IGI Global

The Evolution and Specialization of IETF Standards

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) specification documents corpus spans three decades of Internet standards production. This chapter summarizes the results of an exploratory study on this corpus for understanding how this system of standards and its production have evolved in time. This study takes an alternative perspective, which considers a system like IETF as an organization itself, rather than a constellation of extra-organizational activities. Thus, how it works and evolves are examined with respect to its endogenous dynamics rather than by taking it as a system, which responds to requirements coming from the external environment. The author conducts a longitudinal examination of several features of these documents, their authorship, their dependency and collaboration network structure, and topics. They present a review of how the standards corpus evolves into specialized subsystems and a commentary of findings towards monitoring and managing such standardization processes. © 2015, IGI Global