ARC Regenerative Communities
Summer of Protocols 2024 Final Presentation
Remarkable Regenerative Patterns and Practices of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
Kaliya Identity Woman <kaliya@identitywoman.net>
Day Waterbury <deiim@protonmail.com>
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All Societies are Technical
All Technology is Social
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Recipes for technology are co-created in SDO*s that define the protocols
*SDO Standards Development Organization
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If “Code is Law”
and coders follow protocols when they code.
the SDO*s that define protocols are “legislative bodies”
*SDO Standards Development Organization
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If “Code is Law”
and coders follow protocols when they code.
the SDO*s that define protocols are “legislative bodies”
*SDO Standards Development Organization
What are the legislative processes, or protocols, for protocol creation?
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The Internet is perhaps the
“ultimate” Digital Public Infrastructure,
an active Digital Commons.
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The IETF (and its antecedents) wrote the protocols that made the internet.
It’s protocol TCP/IP won a “protocol war” in the early 1990s vs. the OSI developed by traditional SDOs ITU-T & ISO.
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The IETF's regenerative value-driven approach to protocol creation and supporting the systems for protocol creation is not a limitation, but a necessary condition for maintaining a truly open and innovative Internet ecosystem.
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For ProSocial Tech Communities
We map out the IETF social DNA.
We clarify how the organelles function within it.
We shed light on key patterns and processes needed to grow and maintain digital and physical commons.
Understanding the IETF as Living System
Life as Perpetuation of Purpose
the IETF is very clear that it is not value neutral and clearly says so in its mission statement [RFC 3935]:
The Internet isn't value-neutral, and neither is the IETF. We want the Internet to be useful for communities that share our commitment to openness and fairness. We embrace technical concepts such as decentralized control, edge-user empowerment and sharing of resources, because those concepts resonate with the core values of the IETF community. These concepts have little to do with the technology that's possible, and much to do with the technology that we choose to create.
RFC 2 was a direct response / evolution of RFC 1's
“Host Software” in 1969
RFC 3 shows reflection and iteration on process were present from the beginning.
The content of a NWG [Network Working Group (an IETF Antecedent)] note may be any thought, suggestion, etc. related to the HOST software or other aspect of the network. Notes are encouraged to be timely rather than polished. Philosophical positions without examples or other specifics, specific suggestions or implementation techniques without introductory or background explication, and explicit questions without any attempted answers are all acceptable. The minimum length for a NWG note is one sentence.
These standards (or lack of them) are stated explicitly for two reasons. First, there is a tendency to view a written statement as ipso facto authoritative, and we hope to promote the exchange and discussion of considerably less than authoritative ideas. Second, there is a natural hesitancy to publish something unpolished, and we hope to ease this inhibition.
Tooling for Emergent Knowledge
Embodiment of Process Facilitating, Collective Sense-Making, and Knowledge Creation
The IETF ecosystem supports an ongoing, embodied process of knowledge creation, serving as both a repository of current understanding and a living history of how that knowledge emerged.
The core tools are the DataTracker, Meetecho and mailing lists. We were very impressed by how well the DataTracker functions to knit together the entire process of participation not only in real-time but also over time
Supporting Meeting Participation
Meetecho, the platform used to support onsite and remote people participating in IETF meetings, has evolved to support hybrid meetings, allowing for seamless integration of in-person and remote participants
Closing the Knowledge Loop
By facilitating open communication, preserving the evolution of ideas, and enabling collaborative work, the IETF's tooling supports the view of knowledge as emergent and relational.
Meetecho
DataTracker
Floorplans
Materials
Videos
During & After
- Agenda
- Slides
- Minutes
- Transcript
- Polls
- Chat (Zulip)
- Speaker
- Room
- Remote
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We think the IETF is a regenerative community
What is Regeneration?
Regeneration is a characteristic of living systems which both grow (generate) and decay (degenerate).
“The framework emphasizes that regenerative systems maintain positive reinforcing cycles of wellbeing within and beyond themselves.”
The Internet is Complex.
The IETF holds this
Complexity well.
Cynefin Framework
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We are use three pattern languages
as sources of regenerative patterns.
www.wd-pl.com
groupworksdeck.org
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What is a Pattern Language? [1]
1st one Architecture
& Land Use Focused
Brought into Many
other Fields including
Computer Programming
PLoP Conference focused
on Pattern Languages[2]
Gets at the QWAN Quality without a Name[3] that make Buildings feel alive.
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LOTS OF HISTORY and EVOLUTION the Network & Community Process
“Protocol Wars”
1980s - mid 1990s
TCP/IP vs. OSI model
RFC 1 1969
ARPANET Began 1969
NSFNET
ARPANET switches to TCP/IP in 1983
ARPANET is concluded in 1990
Working Group
Area Director
Working Group
Working Group
Working Group
Working Group
Area Director
Internet Architecture Board
Internet Engineering Steering Group
Final Decision about RFCs/Standards
IETF Structure in 1991
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1992
Nihil de nobis, sine nobis
Not about us without us
Nihil de nobis, sine nobis
Not about us without us
It took until 1996 for the IETF to officially come under the umbrella of ISOC, with RFC 2031 documenting this relationship stating:
All subgroups in the IETF and ISOC that have an official role in the standards process should be either:
- open to anyone (like Working Groups); or
- have a well documented restricted membership in which the voting members are elected or nominated through an open process.
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Power must be earned. Members of a group must trust the people making decisions on their behalf.
Power must be shared. No matter how much trust and support any given decision maker earns, no single person can be expected to completely understand the needs of a community.
Communication must be open throughout all levels of the hierarchy. Hierarchies, by nature, tend to excel at one-to-many pronouncements. But in order for hierarchies to be consensual, communication needs to be able to flow in the other direction as well, from the bottom to the top. Every member of a hierarchy, no matter how lowly their status, should feel empowered to access the decision makers.
Social Permaculture Pattern Language
Consensual Hierarchy
These institutions are all “parallel” in that they are accountable to each other no one is on “top”
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Going Meta with the IAB
The IAB, both collectively and on an individual basis, is expected to pay attention to important long-term issues in the Internet, and to make sure that these issues are brought to the attention of the group(s) that are in a position to address them. It is also expected to play a role in assuring that the people responsible for evolving the Internet and its technology are aware of the essential elements of the Internet architecture.
The IAB will convene invitational workshops to perform in-depth reviews of particular architectural issues.
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The IAB selects people to Fill all these Roles
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NOMCOM SELECTS
These Leadership Roles
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The NomCom Process for Deciding Leadership
How the organization distributes governance and how it embodies and expresses key patterns from the Wise Democracy Pattern Language.
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Working Group Chairs
are Appointed
by Area Directors
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People serving in leadership positions have real clarity about what people in that role do.
It is all written down in RFCs and because the organization at all levels is so transparent, there are a lot of eyes on people as they enact their roles. If they overstep their bounds, people who are paying attention will say something. In this way it is self-regulating and regenerative.
There are RFCs about:
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New Working Groups
Are Approved by
IAB and IESG after a BOF
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What key patterns are present within Working Group meetings – the main meeting form within the IETF.
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What key patterns are present within Working Group meetings – the main meeting form within the IETF.
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Before they can spread to society at large, beneficial ways of living may need to be incubated in a space that is socially, legally, or geographically separate.
Each of these examples points toward a set of common attributes of well-functioning autonomous zones. Whether temporary or permanent, whether managed by Quechua elders or idealist hippies, autonomous zones all require a few key conditions to thrive:
Members of the autonomous zone must have a shared vision as well as a system of governance that reflects and effectively advances that vision.
Membership must be voluntary. The members must be there by their own volition—and fiercely committed to the ideals of the group.
Social Permaculture Pattern Language
Zones of Autonomy
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How an organization that is totally open to participation from anyone in the world maintains its coherence and achieves effective results developing the protocols for data communications networks.
Patterns for Openness and Coherence
Appropriate Boundaries [GWD4] Pattern description:
The health and effectiveness of a group will be partially determined by its ability to develop and maintain appropriate boundaries, and to hold or adapt those boundaries as required.
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Mission Statement: The goal of the IETF is to make the Internet work better.
The mission of the IETF is to produce high quality, relevant technical and engineering documents that influence the way people design, use, and manage the Internet in such a way as to make the Internet work better. These documents include protocol standards, best current practices, and informational documents of various kinds.
The IETF will pursue this mission in adherence to the following cardinal principles:
Open process - any interested person can participate in the work, know what is being decided, and make his or her voice heard on the issue. Part of this principle is our commitment to making our documents, our WG mailing lists, our attendance lists, and our meeting minutes publicly available on the Internet.
Technical competence - the issues on which the IETF produces its documents are issues where the IETF has the competence needed to speak to them, and that the IETF is willing to listen to technically competent input from any source. Technical competence also means that we expect IETF output to be designed to sound network engineering principles - this is also often referred to as "engineering quality".
Volunteer Core - our participants and our leadership are people who come to the IETF because they want to do work that furthers the IETF's mission of "making the Internet work better".
Rough consensus and running code - We make standards based on the combined engineering judgement of our participants and our real- world experience in implementing and deploying our specifications.
Protocol ownership - when the IETF takes ownership of a protocol or function, it accepts the responsibility for all aspects of the protocol, even though some aspects may rarely or never be seen on the Internet. Conversely, when the IETF is not responsible for a protocol or function, it does not attempt to exert control over it, even though it may at times touch or affect the Internet.
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How an organization that is totally open & be coherent?
Stability comes from deepening center, a clarity about who it is, what it needs, what is required to survive in its environment. Self-organizing systems are never passive, hapless victims, forced to react to their environments. As the system matures and develops self-knowledge, it becomes more adept at working with its environment. It uses available resources more effectively, sustaining and strengthening itself. Gradually it develops a stability that helps it shelter from many of the demands of the environment…
Openness to the environment over time spawns a stronger system, one that is less susceptible to externally induced change. What comes to dominate over time is not outside influences, but the self-organizing dynamics of the system itself. Because it partners with its environment, the system develops increasing autonomy from the environment and also develops new capabilities that make it increasingly resourceful.
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How the Ritual and Flow of week-long meetings embody a significant number of Patterns from the Group Works Deck: A Pattern Language for Bringing Life to Meetings and Other Gatherings.
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20. Ritual and Ceremony
Naming an action—and repeating it on a regular basis—affords it a unique power in our consciousness. Use this power to encode healthy patterns and discourage unhealthy ones.
Sense of Place at IETF Meetings
Held in different hotels around the world, the gatherings are effectively “the same” in their layout.
The same desks:
There is a large plenary room (which can be split for Working Group meetings),
8 breakout rooms,
* Two projectors set up, one for the remote participants to be seen/to share on and one for the slides being presented.
2 side meeting rooms.
RFC 8718 outlines the requirements of a venue to help with selection.
Plenary on Wednesday
It was the first, and being first, was the best,
but now we lay it down to ever rest.
Now pause with me a moment, shed some tears.
Of faithful services, duty done, I weep.
Lay down thy packet, now O friend, and sleep.
If an IETFer dies between one meeting and the next they are memorialized during the plenary. The community is good at Practicing Grief [SP38] in healthy ways.
Rituals of Appreciation, Celebration and Grief
Penned by Vint Cerf about the ARPANET in 1989 before it was fully shut down in 1990
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Patterns that underlie the whole organization.
ARPAWOCKY
Twas brillig, and the Protocols
Did USER-SERVER in the wabe.
All mimsey was the FTP,
And the RJE outgrabe,
Beware the ARPANET, my son;
The bits that byte, the heads that scratch;
Beware the NCP, and shun
the frumious system patch,
He took his coding pad in hand;
Long time the Echo-plex he sought.
When his HOST-to-IMP began to limp
he stood a while in thought,
And while he stood, in uffish thought,
The ARPANET, with IMPish bent,
Sent packets through conditioned lines,
And checked them as they went,
One-two, one-two, and through and through
The IMP-to-IMP went ACK and NACK,
When the RFNM came, he said "I'm game",
And sent the answer back,
Then hast thou joined the ARPANET?
Oh come to me, my bankrupt boy!
Quick, call the NIC! Send RFCs!
He chortled in his joy.
Twas brillig, and the Protocols
Did USER-SERVER in the wabe.
All mimsey was the FTP,
And the RJE outgrabe.
D.L. COVILL
May 1973
2.1. The Troll
The troll is an evil beast that frequently appears around the IETF. It feeds alternately on passing goats and cookies, but it prefers above all things the taste of distress, especially that expressed in email.
Trolls should be shunned and never fed. Stories about them being sensitive to water or light are unsubstantiated, but it may be true that they can be pacified with alcohol.
The chief weapons of a Troll are its sharp tongue, its blunt phrasing, and its total disregard for doing useful work.
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Willingness to Experiment & Learn & Learn how to Learn
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Grounding in Running Code for technical protocols &
community leadership and governance protocols
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Social Permaculture Pattern Language
Communal Labor
Communities are bound closer together when members provide communal labor for one another.
Communal labor is equitable. It rotates from household to household as the need arises, relying on no single home over the others.
Communal labor is local. Participating members generally live in close proximity to one another.
Communal labor is the norm. Participation is voluntary, but there is strong cultural pressure to participate—especially if you’ve recently been on the receiving end.
Communal labor is celebratory. It doubles as an opportunity for participants to socialize and gossip. Invariably, the hosts express their gratitude and contribute to the atmosphere of conviviality by supplying food and drink.
Production of the Protocols at IETF
Production of the Tools to Make the Protocols.
The tricky part of describing the IETF process, certainly in the fast changing world of the Internet, is that when you describe the process in too much detail, the IETF loses its flexibility, when you describe to [sic] little it becomes unmanageable. This is therefore a slippery subject, hence the name POISSON, which is French for fish. The French word also serves to indicate the international aspect of the WG.
The Internet after the most consequential Infrastructure Commons [SP25] on the planet.
Tools and infrastructure can be some of the most durable forms of community wealth.
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Kaliya “Identity Woman” Young
For the past 20 years, Kaliya has led a global community of developers and business supporters to create and adopt a layer of identity for people based on open standards. She co-founded the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) to bring together technologists who want to develop and deploy user-centric identity protocols. In the past 15 years, our community has created widely adopted internet standards, including OpenID Connect, OAuth(IETF), Verifiable Credentials(W3C), Decentralized Identifiers(W3C) amongst others. She helped define the term unconference and pioneered using Open Space Technology to organize collaborative events in which the participants themselves create an agenda and define their goals. She is the founding partner of a consultancy focused on Decentralized Identity.
Day Waterbury
What gives my life meaning is to serve and protect the living earth and her people. My mission is to equip the regenerative movement at scale at the pace of the polycrisis, connecting place-based systems change initiatives with trust-based funding, and empowering a global network of networks with tools for coordination. I truly believe that for our species to thrive we need to maximize the number of us who are fully prepared and resourced to contribute collaboratively to co-create a regenerative unfolding. I don’t think of this as political, but rather the rational pursuit of my aspirations on behalf of humanity and the greater blossoming of consciousness in the cosmos. He is the founder of Consensual Ventures a venture acceleration firm.
Researchers
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Tim Beiko
Tim is one of the core organizers of Summer of Protocols. He works for the Ethereum Foundation and runs the core protocol meetings for Ethereum. He is software developer and Ethereum client maintainer based in Vancouver. He has 74 repositories on GitHub, including projects related to Ethereum, Solidity, Python and JavaScript.
Kei Kreutler
Her work explores how cultural narratives of technology shape what worlds we can build. My research centers on philosophy of technology, and recent fellowship work explored the concept of memory in relation to protocols, in particular, how the concept of memory changed with the advent of computing.This culminated in my upcoming book Artificial Memory, which will be announced in more detail soon.
Rosa Zubizarreta, PhD
Is the founder of Diapraxis and has a PhD in Organizational Development. She works with leaders who are committed to organizational health and transformation, and consults with professionals who design and manage:
• public participation projects�• stakeholder collaborations �• community planning processes
Research Jury
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