Liaison Coordination
The IAB acts as representative of the interests of the IETF and the Internet Society in technical liaison relationships with other organizations concerned with standards and other technical and organizational issues relevant to the world-wide Internet.
The IETF has a number of formal liaison relationships with other organizations. The IAB is responsible for overseeing these relationship and liaison coordination in general.
A list of the current IETF liaison relationships, and their corresponding IETF manager, as well as further information about the process of sending or receiving formal liaison statements with or without an established liaison relationship can be found on the IETF website Liaison page. A full list of all sent and received liaison statements can be found in the Liaison Statement tool.
If you have any questions about liaison management including sending and receiving liaison statements, you can send email to the IAB liaison coordinators at liaison-coordination@iab.org. The current liaison coordinators are Suresh Krishnan, Mirja Kühlewind, and Qin Wu.
It should be noted that the number of formal liaison relationships is somewhat small, as the best way for most organizations to work with the IETF is to do so through direct technical, informal collaboration in IETF working groups.
These liaison relationships are established by the IAB when conditions warrant appointing a specific person to manage the inter-organization coordination as described in Section 2.1. of RFC 4052. Please reach out the liaison coordinators for requests to establish a new liaison relationship: liaison-coordination@iab.org.
Once the liaison relationship is established, the IAB appoints a liaison manager to act as the IETF-side point of contact.
For a few liaison relationships with organizations where there are a larger number of document dependencies, especially when specifications are developed in parallel, the IAB maintains Coordination Support Groups: currently there are groups for IEEE, 3GPP, and W3C.
For more information about the procedures that govern IETF liaisons, please see RFC 4052 “IAB Liaison Management”.
Most communication occurs between the IETF liaison manager and the partner organization directly, through the Liaison Statement tool, with the IAB performing only an oversight function. Occasionally correspondence is directed to, or sent by, the IAB itself. Please note that if no formal established liaison relationship exists, it is still possible to send formal liaison statements as described on the IETF Liaisons page.
For more information about the procedures for sending and receiving liaison statements, please see the IETF Liaisons page and RFC 4053 (BCP 103) “Procedures for Handling Liaison Statements to and from the IETF.”