How has India fared in IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force)? Some people may not be aware of what IETF is.
IETF is a standard body whose goal is to make the Internet work better.
I have been participating in IETF on and off for couple of years. I was interested in finding out contribution trends in IETF. It was more to find out which company and which country is contributing to IETF. As part of this, I looked at India’s contribution to IETF. When I say India’s contribution, I am referring to contribution from people working in India.
In last couple of years, while I have seen an exponential increase in the contribution from India, I think it is still far from ‘our best effort’. Let me share some statistics to prove my point:
- Out of around 60 countries who has contributed in IETF, India’s contribution keep us at 13th place.
- Out of around 53 countries currently active in IETF, India comes at 9th place.
- Out of around 9000 documents in IETF, only 180 documents (around 1.95%) has come from India.
- Out of around 6700 RFCs created till now, only 72 RFCs (around 1.07%) has come from India.
- Out of around 15700 authors in IETF, only 67 authors has come from India.
- Out of around 100 working groups in IETF, authors from India are active only in 29 working groups.
- As far as I know, till now, there has never been anybody from India who has been a working group chair or Area Director in IETF.
- India has never hosted an IETF meeting.
I agree that these statisitcs do not paint a rosy picture. To bring out the relative performance of India, I decided to see this data against some other country and choose China. I choose China for a very specific reason as China and India, both started contributing in IETF around the same time. Let us look at similar numbers for China:
- Out of around 60 countries, China is at 4th place.
- Out of around 53 countries currently active in IETF, China is at 2nd place.
- Out of around 9000 documents in IETF, 583 documents (6.30%) has come from China.
- Out of around 6700 RFCs created till now, 127 RFCs (1.88%) has come from China.
- Out of around 15700 authors in IETF, only 337 authors has come from China.
- Out of around 100 working groups in IETF, authors from China are active in more than 50 working groups.
- China has hosted an IETF meeting.
So based on the numbers, its clear that China’s contribution in IETF is growing with far better rate than ours.
I just wanted to point out our (India) dismal standalone as well as relative performance in one of the leading standardize body (IETF).
In some future post, I will discuss what we, as individuals, as companies and as a country, should do to improve the quality and quantity of this participation. I would request people to think and post their suggestions on the same.
Credit:
All the IETF data mentioned in this post has been fetched from IETF statistics web page.
Note: The blog post was originally published here: http://bite-the-bytes.blogspot.in/ and has been reproduced with due permissions from the author. The number mentioned above are from 2013, and shall be updated soon.
Photo credits: Freepik.com