The Web We Weave: Untangling the Social Graph of the IETF

Khare, P., Karan, M., McQuistin, S. , Perkins, C. , Tyson, G., Purver, M., Healey, P. and Castro, I. (2022) The Web We Weave: Untangling the Social Graph of the IETF. In: 16th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM-22), Atlanta, Georgia, USA, 6-9 June 2022, pp. 500-511. ISBN 9781577358756

Abstract

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has developed many of the technical standards that underpin the Internet. The standards development process followed by the IETF is open and consensus-driven, but is inherently both a social and political activity, and latent influential structures might exist within the community. Exploring and understanding these structures is essential to ensuring the IETF’s resilience and openness. We use network analysis to explore the social graph of IETF participants, based on public email discussions and co-author relationships, and the influence of key contributors. We show that a small core of participants dominates: the top 10% contribute almost half (43.75%) of the emails and come from a relatively small group of organisations. On the other hand, we also find that influence has become relatively more decentralised with time. IETF participants also propose and work on drafts that are either adopted by a working group for further refinement or get rejected at an early stage. Using the social graph features combined with email text features, we perform regression analysis to understand the effect of user influence on the success of new work being adopted by the IETF. Our findings shed useful insights into the behavior of participants across time, correlation between influence and success in draft adoption, and the significance of affiliated organisations in the authorship of drafts.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Additional Information: This work is supported by the EPSRC under grants, SODE-STRAM: Streamlining Social Decision Making for Im-proved Internet Standards (EP/S033564/1, EP/S036075/1),and AP4L: Adaptive PETs to Protect emPower Peopleduring Life Transitions (EP/W032473/1).
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: McQuistin, Dr Stephen and Perkins, Dr Colin
• Authors: Khare, P., Karan, M., McQuistin, S., Perkins, C., Tyson, G., Purver, M., Healey, P., and Castro, I.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• ISSN: 2334-0770
• ISBN: 9781577358756
• Published Online: 31 May 2022
• First Published: First published in Vol. 16 (2022): Proceedings of the Sixteenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media: 500-511

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Project Code	Award No	Project Name	Principal Investigator	Funder's Name	Funder Ref	Lead Dept
304292		Streamlining Social Decision Making for Improved Internet Standards	Colin Perkins	Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)	EP/S036075/1	Computing Science