IETF | Guide to IETF Meetings

The IETF works on a broad range of networking technologies that provide the foundation for the Internet's growth and evolution.
While most IETF work takes place online, meetings and other events such as Hackathons provide in-person opportunities to advance work within the IETF.
The IETF is the premier Internet standards organization. It follows open and well-documented processes for setting these standards. Once published, those standards are made freely available.
The global IETF community works together in many different ways to produce high quality, relevant technical documents that influence the way people design, use, and manage the Internet.
By supporting the IETF today, you are ensuring a free and open Internet exists tomorrow.
A detailed guide to IETF meetings, how they work, what to expect, and how to get the best from them.
The IETF holds three week-long meetings a year. Onsite participation averages between 1000 and 1500 participants. Every effort is made to integrate the 600+ remote participants into the overall meeting experience.
IETF meetings are working meetings with the primary goal of helping Working Groups (WGs) get their tasks done, and the secondary goal of promoting mixing among the WGs. Most of the agenda is comprised of multiple simultaneous sessions for Working Groups. Only a small section of the agenda is set aside for tutorials, a single industry presentation, one or two panel sessions, and two receptions for the whole community to come together.
IETF meetings are not conferences. There is no exposition hall, no booths, no marketing staff and no advertising.
The dates of upcoming meetings are set many years in advance.
IETF meetings are of high interest to engineers, developers, academics, researchers, and interested individuals from:
Vendors. Employees of networking hardware and software vendors are often the IETF particiants writing the protocols and leading the Working Groups. If you create Internet hardware or software, or run a service available on the Internet, and no one from your company has ever attended an IETF meeting, it behooves you to come to a meeting if for no other reason than to tell the others in your company how relevant the meeting was or was not to your business.
Operators. A fair amount of IETF work covers many parts of the operations of ISPs, social media platforms, streaming media companies, large enterprises, and specialist industries such as domain name registries and registrars. The IETF has several WGs focused on operations, in addition to many relevant protocols under development. For example, the IETF is increasingly working on encrypting network traffic, which has significant implications for operators. Many of the best operations documents from the IETF come from real-world operators.
Academia. IETF meetings are often excellent places for all kinds of academics and researchers to find out what is happening in the way of soon-to-be-deployed protocols, and networking architecture and infrastructure. Professors and grad students (and sometimes overachieving undergrads) who are doing research in networking or communications can get a wealth of information by following Working Groups in their specific fields of interest. Wandering into different Working Group meetings can have the same effect as going to symposia and seminars in your department. The Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) meets concurrently with the IETF and IRTF Research Groups (analogous to WGs) are of high interest to researchers. There is also an annual Applied Networking Research Workshop held in conjunction with an IETF meeting.
Contractors/Consultants. There is as small and active number of technical contractors/consultants who specialize in Internet standards development, or an aspect of it, such as cryptography. These contractors are often empoloyed by organisations for whom standards development is a peripheral rather than a core activity, such as governments.
Interested individuals. There are many people who participate solely as individuals with no direct link to their employment. A key principle of the IETF is that participation is as an individual not a formal representative of an employer, and so interested individuals have as much opportunity to contribute as anyone else.
Civil Society. A few people from civil society organizations participate in the IETF looking at the parts of IETF work that have broader policy implications.
Given that IETF meetings are very different from trade conferences or learning/training-based conferences, there are some roles who would probably get little benefit from participating:
IETF meetings are not designed or intended for sales and marketing people. There are no sales booths, no advertising is permitted and there are no opportunities for marketing presentations.
As the IETF is a technical organization, there are rarely any opportunities for non-technical policy makers or policy advocates to contribute.
If your intention is to find out what will be hot in the Internet industry next year, you can safely assume that coming to an IETF meeting will confuse you more than it will help you understand what is happening, or will be happening, in the industry.
Finally, please note there are many people who have been very active and very productive in the IETF who have never attended an IETF meeting, and you should not feel obligated to come to an IETF meeting in order to contribute.
To participate in an IETF meeting, either onsite or remotely, you have to register and pay a registration fee. If you cannot afford the online registration fee, you can apply for a fee waiver to then apply during the registration process. There are different fee schedules for early-bird, latecomers, single-day passes, students, and so on. The general registration fee covers all of the week's meetings, except the Social Event, which is an additional ticket purchased through the registration system. The registration system also provides the options to regi