IETF | IETF 121 post-meeting survey

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.
In October 2026, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) held a two-day workshop in Prague with people who are deploying post-quantum authentication. These are the first impressions from the co-chairs, ahead of the full workshop report.
Email is the oldest widely used application on the Internet, but it continues to evolve. At IETF 127 four working groups will meet to improve the security and usability of mail, and two Birds-of-a-Feather sessions propose improvements in mail operations and the way users sign up for mail subscriptions.
The IETF Administration LLC has prepared its draft budget for 2027 and now seeks community feedback.
These IETF 127 meeting sessions are likely to include discussions and proposals that are accessible to a broad range of Internet technologists whether they are new to the IETF or long-time participants.
Several new features implemented on RFC-Editor.org aim to make the site more useful and engaging for RFC consumers.
In October 2026, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) held a two-day workshop in Prague with people who are deploying post-quantum authentication. These are the first impressions from the co-chairs, ahead of the full workshop report.
Email is the oldest widely used application on the Internet, but it continues to evolve. At IETF 127 four working groups will meet to improve the security and usability of mail, and two Birds-of-a-Feather sessions propose improvements in mail operations and the way users sign up for mail subscriptions.
The IETF Administration LLC has prepared its draft budget for 2027 and now seeks community feedback.
These IETF 127 meeting sessions are likely to include discussions and proposals that are accessible to a broad range of Internet technologists whether they are new to the IETF or long-time participants.
Several new features implemented on RFC-Editor.org aim to make the site more useful and engaging for RFC consumers.
IETF 121 Dublin was held 2-8 November 2024
The results of the IETF 121 Dublin post-meeting survey are now available on a interactive dashboard. Thank you to all of you who responded to this survey as we use your views to continually adjust the meeting experience.
We received 225 responses, 206 onsite and 19 remote. With 1592 registered participants, this gives the survey a maximum margin of error of +/- 6.06%. The number of remote respondents was much lower than previous surveys and the margin of error for that segment is +/-22.14%, so any results specific to remote participants are unreliable.
The results for satisfaction questions include a mean and standard deviation using a five point scale scoring system of Very satisfied = 5, Satisfied = 4, Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied = 3, Dissatisfied = 2, Very dissatisfied = 1. While there’s no hard and fast rule, a mean of above 4.50 is sometimes considered excellent, 4.00 to 4.49 is good, 3.50 to 3.99 is acceptable and below 3.50 is either poor or very poor if below 3.00. The satisfaction score tables also include a top box, the total of satisfied and very satisfied, and a bottom box, the total of dissatisfied and very dissatisfied, both in percentages. Please note that a small number of questions are on a four point scale.
For this survey we introduced a new matrix question about remote participation and added new lines to existing questions about the lunch break time of 11:30am, realtime transcripts and games night. As there was no social event, we again dropped the question about opportunities for social interaction.
As a one-off, we had a set of questions about the alldispatch experiment, which concluded at this meeting.
For this meeting, we made the following changes, prompted by survey feedback:
Overall satisfaction is 4.30, a good result. With some key exceptions, the satisfaction scores remain high.
The table below shows the satisfaction scores for the last six meetings, along with colour coded indicators for the five point scale above: excellent (🔵), good (🟢), acceptable (🟡), poor (🔴), very poor (⚫️)
We once again asked people why they participated remotely and asked if those who participated remotely would have wanted to participate onsite.
Putting the two together continues to show a consistent proportion of remote participants would have participated onsite but were unable to do so because they did not have the funding.
However, remote participation itself gets high satisfaction scores for the various components (an overall satisfaction question was accidentally omitted).
For the second time asked the question "What was the primary source of funding for your onsite participation?", with the overwhelming majority (72.65%) funded by their employer, and the next highest segment (10.76%) using their own personal funds.
We regularly include a set of questions for those who identify themselves as new participants and these have been used to drive large changes to the new participant program over the last two years. We will provide a more detailed analysis of the results of these questions in a future blog post.
The satisfaction score this time around (2.88) is Very Poor and by far the worst score we've had for any area of the experience under our direct control. I can only apologise and pledge that we will ensure that th