IETF Statistics

Document Statistics

“What's Going on in the IETF?”

The Purpose of These Statistics

These statistics have been created in order to understand who and where is doing IETF work in terms of drafts and RFCs. Which companies are the most active contributors? How has the situation changed over the years? Who has published most RFCs? What percentage of drafts use ABNF or PDF?

However, this is provided mostly as a "nice to know" information; often the information has only entertainment value. But in some cases it can be used to find out what a particular person has done in the IETF, where IETF efforts are done in the world, what a particular company is focusing on, etc that may have some practical application.

Details of the tool's measurement mechanisms are available in the tool description.

Documents

The distribution of document and according to number of authors here, Document page count distribution looks like this. The used document format types and content features are shown here.

RFC publication rate is shown below.

pubdistr

Authors

The distribution of authors according to the number of documents they have is shown separately for drafts, recent RFCs, and all RFCs. For the purposes of this analysis, recent RFCs have been defined as any RFC from RFC 7000 onwards.

The relative impact of the RFCs of the different authors can be seen here.

The authors work in one or multiple WGs according this distribution. The same distribution for cross-area work is here. Most active authors per area can be seen here.

New RFC authors on a given year can be seen here:

newauthors

Areas and WGs

The distribution of WGs per areas is shown in here. The distribution of drafts according to WGs is shown here, and according to areas is shown here.

Affiliations

This analysis shows which companies are behind the authors for drafts, recent RFCs, all RFCs, and all documents.

companydistr

Over the years, the situation has changed like this (normalized), counted from RFCs.

Countries and Continents

This analysis shows from which countries drafts, recent RFCs, RFCs, and all documents come from. Over the years, the situation for RFCs has developed like this (normalized).

countrydistrhist

Considering EU as a country, the distribution would look like this for drafts, recent RFCs, RFCs, and all documents instead.

The same distribution for continents is here for drafts, recent RFCs, RFCs, and all documents. Over the years, the situation for RFCs has developed like this (normalized).

d-contdist

Authors come from these countries for drafts, recent RFCs, RFCs, and all documents. Considering EU as a country, the distribution would look like this for drafts, recent RFCs, RFCs, and all documents instead. The same distribution for continents can be found here for drafts, recent RFCs, RFCs, and all documents.

Detailed data

All active authors can be seen here. Countries can be seen here. And active companies can be seen here.

Information Sources

The information is gathered from the following public sources:

  • Published RFCs and drafts. The getauthors tool can recover author information from these documents.
  • IETF web site information about WGs, areas, chairs, ADs, IAB members, etc.

Reliability

The statistics gathering system is unable to parse all documents for author information. See the list of fatal problems in drafts and RFCs. Many entries have limited information. See where this happens for drafts and RFCs. Drafts for which draftname@tools.ietf.org addresses do not work or do not work fully can be seen here.

Warning: See the tool description for detailed information about what can or can not be assumed about the quality of the results.

Privacy

For various good reasons the IETF process for making submissions is open and all information, including author's information is publicly available. The statistics tools use this information. In the most recent version of the statistics tools, the statistics are based only on documents submitted to the IETF.

Should there be any concern about any information relating to a particular document author in these statistics, we provide an opportunity to send corrections or even remove data concerning a particular author on request. Email jari.arkko(at)piuha.net.takeaway to contact the developer. Please use a subject line that includes the word authorstats. Our privacy policy can be found in here.

The document statistics software, bandwidth, servers, and source data have been brought to you by Jari Arkko.