IETF
acronymStands for: Internet Engineering Task Force
The body that standardizes the internet's protocols, in the open, as RFCs.
The Internet Engineering Task Force works by 'rough consensus and running code': open working groups produce Internet-Drafts that mature into RFCs - TCP, HTTP, TLS, DNS, and nearly every protocol this site's tools decode. Anyone can participate; there is no membership fee. It operates alongside IANA (registries) and the RFC Editor (publication), and its documents are the primary sources this site links by preference.
The motto came from a plenary talk. RFC 7282, on consensus in the IETF, opens with it: 'We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code', attributed to Dave Clark at the twenty-fourth IETF meeting in 1992. The same RFC explains the practice behind it in its section titles: 'We don't vote in the IETF'; 'Rough consensus is achieved when all issues are addressed, but not necessarily accommodated'; and 'Humming should be the start of a conversation, not the end'.
The output is the RFC series, on the standards track that RFC 6410 reduced to two levels, Proposed Standard and Internet Standard. Running code is the other half of the motto: under RFC 2026, a specification reached the middle level only once 'at least two independent and interoperable implementations from different code bases' existed, the test that it can actually be followed.
Also known as: ietf, rfc process, internet-draft