IETF Working Group Guidelines and Procedures
The following are excerpts from RFC2418:
1.
There is no formal membership in the IETF. Participation is open to all. This participation may be by on-line contribution, attendance at face-to-face sessions, or both. Anyone from the Internet community who has the time and interest is urged to participate in IETF meetings and any of its on-line working group discussions. Participation is by individual technical contributors, rather than by formal representatives of organizations.
2.2
An IETF working group MUST have a general Internet mailing list. Most of the work of an IETF working group will be conducted on the mailing list.
3.1
All working group actions shall be taken in a public forum, and wide participation is encouraged. A working group will conduct much of its business via electronic mail distribution lists but may meet periodically to discuss and review task status and progress, to resolve specific issues and to direct future activities. IETF Plenary meetings are the primary venue for these face-to-face working group sessions
The next meeting of the IETF is August 1-6, 2004 in San Diego, CA, USA.
Sam, I think this passage from section 3.2 is also worth pulling out in case people are worried about not being able to get to meetings:
In determining the balance, the WG must ensure that its process does not serve to exclude contribution by email-only participants. Decisions reached during a face-to-face meeting about topics or issues which have not been discussed on the mailing list, or are significantly different from previously arrived mailing list consensus MUST be reviewed on the mailing list.
Posted by Adrian Bateman at