Network Working Group H. Alvestrand
Request for Comments: 3935 Cisco Systems
BCP: 95 October 2004
Category: Best Current Practice
Network Working Group H. Alvestrand
Request for Comments: 3935 Cisco Systems
BCP: 95 October 2004
Category: Best Current Practice
A Mission Statement for the IETF
IETF的使命宣言
Status of this Memo
本备忘录的状况
This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.
本文件规定了互联网社区的最佳现行做法，并要求进行讨论和提出改进建议。本备忘录的分发不受限制。
Copyright Notice
版权公告
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2004).
版权所有（C）互联网协会（2004年）。
Abstract
摘要
This memo gives a mission statement for the IETF, tries to define the terms used in the statement sufficiently to make the mission statement understandable and useful, argues why the IETF needs a mission statement, and tries to capture some of the debate that led to this point.
本备忘录给出了IETF的任务声明，试图充分定义声明中使用的术语，使任务声明易于理解和使用，论证了IETF需要任务声明的原因，并试图抓住导致这一点的一些争论。
The goal of the IETF is to make the Internet work better.
IETF的目标是使互联网更好地工作。
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.
IETF的任务是生成高质量、相关的技术和工程文档，这些文档影响人们设计、使用和管理互联网的方式，从而使互联网更好地工作。这些文档包括协议标准、当前最佳实践和各种信息文档。
The IETF will pursue this mission in adherence to the following cardinal principles:
IETF将遵循以下基本原则执行此任务：
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.
开放式流程——任何感兴趣的人都可以参与工作，知道正在决定什么，并在问题上发表自己的意见。这一原则的一部分是我们承诺在互联网上公开我们的文件、我们的工作组邮件列表、我们的出席名单和我们的会议记录。
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
技术能力——IETF编制文件的问题是IETF有能力与他们交谈的问题，并且IETF愿意倾听
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".
来自任何来源的技术上合格的输入。技术能力还意味着，我们期望IETF输出的设计符合健全的网络工程原则——这也通常被称为“工程质量”。
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".
志愿者核心-我们的参与者和领导者都是来参加IETF的人，因为他们想做一些工作来推进IETF“让互联网更好地工作”的使命。
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.
粗略的共识和运行代码——我们根据参与者的综合工程判断和我们在实施和部署规范方面的实际经验制定标准。
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.
协议所有权-当IETF获得协议或功能的所有权时，它接受协议所有方面的责任，即使某些方面可能很少或从未在互联网上看到。相反，当IETF不负责某一协议或功能时，它不会试图对其施加控制，即使它有时可能接触或影响互联网。
Mission: What an organization sets out to do. This is in contrast to its goal (which is what it hopes to achieve by fulfilling its mission), and to its activities (which is what specific actions it takes to achieve its mission).
使命：一个组织要做的事情。这与它的目标（这是它希望通过履行使命来实现的目标）和它的活动（这是它为实现使命而采取的具体行动）形成了对比。
The Internet: A large, heterogeneous collection of interconnected systems that can be used for communication of many different types between any interested parties connected to it. The term includes both the "core Internet" (ISP networks) and "edge Internet" (corporate and private networks, often connected via firewalls, NAT boxes, application layer gateways and similar devices). The Internet is a truly global network, reaching into just about every country in the world. The IETF community wants the Internet to succeed because we believe that the existence of the Internet, and its influence on economics, communication, and education, will help us to build a better human society.
互联网：一个大型的、异构的互联系统集合，可用于连接到它的任何相关方之间的多种不同类型的通信。该术语包括“核心互联网”（ISP网络）和“边缘互联网”（公司和专用网络，通常通过防火墙、NAT盒、应用层网关和类似设备连接）。互联网是一个真正的全球网络，几乎覆盖了世界上的每一个国家。IETF社区希望互联网取得成功，因为我们相信互联网的存在及其对经济、通信和教育的影响将帮助我们建设一个更好的人类社会。
Standard: As used here, the term describes a specification of a protocol, system behaviour or procedure that has a unique identifier, and where the IETF has agreed that "if you want to do this thing, this is the description of how to do it". It does not imply any attempt by the IETF to mandate its use, or any attempt to police its usage - only that "if you say that you are doing this according to this standard, do it this way". The benefit of
标准：此处使用的术语描述具有唯一标识符的协议、系统行为或程序规范，IETF同意“如果您想做这件事，这是如何做的描述”。它并不意味着IETF试图强制使用它，也不意味着试图监督它的使用——只是“如果你说你是按照这个标准做的，那么就这样做”。好处
a standard to the Internet is in interoperability - that multiple products implementing a standard are able to work together in order to deliver valuable functions to the Internet's users.
互联网的一个标准是互操作性——实现一个标准的多个产品能够协同工作，以便为互联网用户提供有价值的功能。
Participants: Individuals who participate in the process are the fundamental unit of the IETF organization and the IETF's work. The IETF has found that the process works best when focused around people, rather than around organizations, companies, governments or interest groups. That is not to say that these other entities are uninteresting - but they are not what constitutes the IETF.
参与者：参与过程的个人是IETF组织和IETF工作的基本单位。IETF发现，当关注于人而不是组织、公司、政府或利益集团时，该过程最有效。这并不是说这些其他实体是无趣的——但它们不是IETF的组成部分。
Quality: In this context, the ability to express ideas with enough clarity that they can be understood in the same way by all people building systems to conform to them, and the ability (and willingness) to describe the properties of the system well enough to understand important consequences of its design, and to ensure that those consequences are beneficial to the Internet as a whole. It also means that the specifications are designed with adherence to sound network engineering principles, so that use for its intended purpose is likely to be effective and not harmful to the Internet as a whole.
质量：在这种情况下，能够以足够清晰的方式表达想法，使所有构建系统的人都能以同样的方式理解这些想法，并且能够（和愿意）充分描述系统的特性，从而理解其设计的重要后果，并确保这些后果对整个互联网有利。这也意味着规范的设计遵循了健全的网络工程原则，因此用于其预期目的可能是有效的，并且不会对整个互联网有害。
Relevant: In this context, useful to some group of people who have to make decisions that affect the Internet, including, but not limited to, hardware and software implementors, network builders, network operators, and users of the Internet. Note that it does not mean "correct" or "positive" - a report of an experiment that failed, or a specification that clearly says why you should not use it in a given situation, can be highly relevant - for deciding what NOT to do. A part of being relevant is being timely - very often, documents delivered a year after core decisions have been taken are far less useful than documents that are available to the decision-makers at decision time.
相关：在这种情况下，对一些必须做出影响互联网的决策的人群有用，包括但不限于硬件和软件实施者、网络建设者、网络运营商和互联网用户。请注意，它并不意味着“正确”或“积极”——一份失败实验的报告，或一份明确说明在给定情况下不应使用它的说明，可能与决定不做什么高度相关。相关的一部分是及时的——通常，在作出核心决定一年后提交的文件远不如决策者在决策时可获得的文件有用。
The IETF has to make decisions. And in some cases, people acting on behalf of the IETF have to make decisions without consulting the entire IETF first.
IETF必须做出决定。在某些情况下，代表IETF行事的人必须在不咨询整个IETF的情况下做出决策。
There are many reasons for this, including the near-impossibility of getting an informed consensus opinion on a complex subject out of a community of several thousand people in a short time.
原因有很多，包括几乎不可能在短时间内从数千人的社区中获得关于一个复杂问题的知情共识意见。
Having a defined mission is one of the steps we can take in order to evaluate alternatives: Does this help or hinder the mission, or is it orthogonal to it? If there are limited resources, are there things that they could be invested in that help the mission better?
制定明确的任务是我们评估备选方案所能采取的步骤之一：这有助于或阻碍任务，还是与任务正交？如果资源有限，他们是否可以投资一些东西来更好地帮助特派团？
(Another step is to choose leaders that we trust to exercise their good judgement and do the right thing. But we're already trying to do that.)
（另一个步骤是选择我们信任的领导人，让他们发挥良好的判断力，做正确的事情。但我们已经在努力做到这一点。）
A very difficult issue in discussing the IETF's mission has been the scope of the term "for the Internet". The Internet is used for many things, many of which the IETF community has neither interest nor competence in making standards for.
在讨论IETF任务时，一个非常困难的问题是“互联网”一词的范围。互联网被用于许多事情，其中许多事情IETF社区既没有兴趣也没有能力为其制定标准。
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.
互联网不是价值中立的，IETF也不是。我们希望互联网对那些与我们共同致力于开放和公平的社区有用。我们采用分散控制、边缘用户授权和资源共享等技术概念，因为这些概念与IETF社区的核心价值观产生共鸣。这些概念与可能的技术关系不大，而与我们选择创造的技术关系很大。
At the same time, it is clear that many of the IETF-defined technologies are useful not only for the Internet, but also for networks that have no direct relation to the Internet itself.
同时，很明显，许多IETF定义的技术不仅对互联网有用，而且对与互联网本身没有直接关系的网络也有用。
In attempting to resolve the question of the IETF's scope, perhaps the fairest balance is struck by this formulation: "protocols and practices for which secure and scalable implementations are expected to have wide deployment and interoperation on the Internet, or to form part of the infrastructure of the Internet."
在试图解决IETF范围的问题时，也许最公平的平衡点是这样的表述：“安全和可扩展的实施预期在互联网上具有广泛的部署和互操作，或形成互联网基础设施的一部分的协议和实践。”
In addition to this constraint, we are also constrained by the principle of competence: Where we do not have, and cannot gather, the competence needed to make technically sound standards, we should not attempt to take the leadership.
除此之外，我们还受到能力原则的约束：在我们没有、也无法收集制定技术上可靠的标准所需的能力的地方，我们不应该试图领导。
The IETF has traditionally been a community for experimentation with things that are not fully understood, standardization of protocols for which some understanding has been reached, and publication of (and refinement of) protocols originally specified outside the IETF process.
IETF传统上是一个社区，用于对未完全理解的事物进行实验，对已达成某种理解的协议进行标准化，以及发布（和完善）最初在IETF过程之外指定的协议。
All of these activities have in common that they produce documents - but the documents should be judged by very different criteria when the time to publish comes around, and it's not uncommon to see people confused about what documents are in which category.
所有这些活动都有一个共同点，那就是它们生成文档——但是当发布的时候，应该根据非常不同的标准来判断文档，并且经常会看到人们对哪些文档属于哪一类感到困惑。
In deciding whether or not these activities should be done within the IETF, one should not chiefly look at the type of activity, but the potential benefit to the Internet - an experiment that yields information about the fact that an approach is not viable might be of greater benefit to the Internet than publishing a standard that is technically competent, but only useful in a few special cases.
在决定这些活动是否应在IETF内进行时，不应主要关注活动类型，但对互联网的潜在好处——一个实验产生了关于一种方法不可行这一事实的信息——可能比发布一个技术上合格但仅在少数特殊情况下有用的标准对互联网的好处更大。
For research of an essentially unbounded nature, with unknown probability of success, it may be more relevant to charter a research group than a standards group. For activities with a bounded scope - such as specifying several alternative protocols to the point where experiments can identify the better one for standardization - the IETF's working group mechanism may be an appropriate tool.
对于本质上无限的研究，成功概率未知，成立一个研究小组可能比成立一个标准小组更为相关。对于范围有限的活动，例如指定几个替代协议，以便通过实验确定更好的标准化协议，IETF的工作组机制可能是一个合适的工具。
The mission is intended to state what the IETF is trying to achieve. There are many methods that can be chosen to achieve these outcomes - for instance, the appeals procedure is defined so that we can detect cases where our fundamental principles of technical competence and open process has been violated; it is not itself a fundamental value.
该任务旨在说明IETF试图实现的目标。可以选择许多方法来实现这些结果——例如，定义上诉程序，以便我们能够发现违反我们的技术能力和公开程序基本原则的案件；它本身并不是一种基本价值观。
Similarly, the question of what body in the IETF declares that a document is ready for publication is entirely outside the mission statement; we can imagine changing that without in any way impacting what the IETF mission is - even though it may significantly impact the ability to achieve that mission.
同样，IETF中的哪个机构宣布文件已准备好发布的问题完全超出了任务声明的范围；我们可以想象在不以任何方式影响IETF任务的情况下改变这一点，即使它可能会显著影响实现该任务的能力。
The Internet is a global phenomenon. The people interested in its evolution are from every culture under the sun and from all walks of life. The IETF puts its emphasis on technical competence, rough consensus and individual participation, and needs to be open to competent input from any source. The IETF uses the English language for its work is because of its utility for working in a global context.
互联网是一种全球现象。对其演变感兴趣的人来自世界各地的文化和各行各业。IETF强调技术能力、大致共识和个人参与，并需要对来自任何来源的胜任输入开放。IETF在其工作中使用英语是因为其在全球范围内工作的实用性。
A problem akin to the problem of deciding on the area of the IETF's competence arises when a protocol that is clearly in the IETF's scope is used both on and off the Internet - the premier example is of course the Internet Protocol itself.
当在互联网上和互联网下都使用明显属于IETF范围的协议时，会出现一个类似于决定IETF权限范围的问题——首要的例子当然是互联网协议本身。
Sometimes the IETF defines standards that ultimately see the most use outside the global Internet. The IETF, having defined the standard, will continue to provide the necessary administration of that protocol.
有时，IETF定义的标准最终会在全球互联网之外得到最多的使用。IETF定义了标准，将继续提供该协议的必要管理。
Sometimes the IETF leverages standards that are defined and maintained by other organizations; we continue to work with those organizations on their standards and do not attempt to take them over.
有时IETF利用由其他组织定义和维护的标准；我们继续就这些组织的标准与它们合作，不试图接管它们。
Considering security is one of the core principles of sound network engineering for the Internet. Apart from that, it's not relevant to this memo.
考虑安全性是互联网健全网络工程的核心原则之一。除此之外，这与这份备忘录无关。
This document is a result of many hours of debate, countless reviews, and limitless emails. As such, any acknowledgements section is bound to be incomplete.
这份文件是经过数小时的辩论、无数的评论和无限的电子邮件而形成的。因此，任何确认部分都必然是不完整的。
Among the many who provided input were the current members of the IESG (Alex Zinin, Allison Mankin, Bert Wijnen, Bill Fenner, David Kessens, Jon Peterson, Margaret Wasserman, Russ Housley, Scott Hollenbeck, Steve Bellovin, Ted Hardie, Thomas Narten) and recent IESG members (Ned Freed, Randy Bush, Erik Nordmark), as well as multiple IAB members, and many members from the community, including James Polk, John Klensin, Pekka Savola, Paul Hoffman, Eliot Lear, Jonne Soininen, Fred Baker, Dean Anderson, John Leslie, Susan Harris, and many others. Special thanks go to Leslie Daigle, the IAB chair.
提供投入的许多人包括IESG的现任成员（亚历克斯·齐宁、埃里森·曼金、伯特·维恩、比尔·芬纳、大卫·凯森斯、乔恩·彼得森、玛格丽特·沃瑟曼、罗斯·霍斯利、斯科特·霍伦贝克、史蒂夫·贝洛文、泰德·哈迪、托马斯·纳顿）和IESG的近期成员（内德·弗里德、兰迪·布什、埃里克·诺德马克）以及IAB的多名成员，还有来自社区的许多成员，包括詹姆斯·波尔克、约翰·克莱辛、佩卡·萨沃拉、保罗·霍夫曼、艾略特·李尔、乔恩·索尼宁、弗雷德·贝克、迪安·安德森、约翰·莱斯利、苏珊·哈里斯和许多其他人。特别感谢国际律师协会主席莱斯利·戴格尔。
Author's Address
作者地址
Harald Tveit Alvestrand Cisco Systems Weidemanns vei 27 Trondheim 7043 NO
Harald Tveit Alvestrand Cisco Systems Weidemans vei 27特隆赫姆7043号
EMail: harald@alvestrand.no
EMail: harald@alvestrand.no
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