In short, this is the rough process for the initial part until Proposed Standard stage:
- You/we need to decide whether this fits into an existing working group. Standardization does not require working group review and some drafts become standards without having gone through a working group, but this is rare for all but small additions to existing standards.
- Write an Internet Draft, in ASCII and possibly PostScript (PostScript is mainly convenient for including change-bars);
- Ask chairs of relevant working group whether this is to be an official work item of the WG. If yes, it gets the name draft-ietf-wg-something-00, if not you can submit it as personal contribution and it will be named draft-gore-internet-00, assuming your name is Gore. If the former, it will appear on the WG web page, if the latter on the list of individual contributions. In either case, it will be announced on the IETF mailing list.
- Submit the draft to the repository by sending it to internet-drafts@ietf.org, with cc to the chairs of the WG. It will appear in the Internet drafts directory within a few days -- and disappear automatically after six months unless refreshed with a new version;
- You may then ask (or be asked) to present the important items of the draft at the next IETF meeting. The presentation should concentrate on the open issues rather than being a tutorial on the protocol - attendees are expected to have read the draft. Be sure to submit the draft well ahead of the IETF meeting, as there is a cut-off date several weeks ahead of the meeting week. During the weeks before the IETF meeting, several hundred Internet Drafts may be submitted.
- Once there has been sufficient comment (and maybe a few revisions of the Internet draft, with names like draft-ietf-wg-something-01, etc. - larger documents often go through a dozen, e.g., SIP had twelve), ask the chair(s) of the WG for a "last call" within the WG;
- Next, the chair submits it to the IESG for an IETF "last call" of approximately one month;
- The IESG decides after the last call at one of their monthly meetings whether the last call and their internal reviews indicates that the document is ready for publication;
- If it is, it is declared a Proposed Standard and announced to the IETF mailing list, with some comments about its technical history or the working group process;
- The authors then work with the RFC editor to produce the RFC. This can take between one month and several months. The RFC editor maintains a status summary on a web page that provides rough guidance as to where the RFC is in its production cycle. You will not be given an RFC number until the process is complete.
- Just before the RFC is published, the authors will be given 48 hours in which to correct any typographical errors or formatting problems. After that, the RFC will be announced to the IETF mailing list and will be available through the various RFC archives.
We maintain a number of lists (at present "dsn", "abuse", "postmaster", "whois" and "ipwhois") which contain domains or IP networks whose administrators choose not to obey the RFC's, the building block "rules" of the net.
Carpenter's Conjecture:
The number of people attending IETF meetings held in the USA is approximately equal to the highest RFC number published so far.
