Leadership Quote by Steve Crocker

Crocker is doing something that looks modest but is actually radical: he’s defining legitimacy as process, not prestige. The IETF has never been a cathedral of authority; it’s a workshop where credibility is earned in public, line by line, draft by draft. So when he calls “organise and manage itself” the “most important thing,” he’s insisting that the plumbing matters as much as the product. Standards don’t just emerge from brilliance. They emerge from meeting notes, mailing-list etiquette, clear chairs, repeatable decision-making, and enough procedural fairness that the losing side sticks around to fight the next round.

The phrasing carries IETF DNA: quality, efficiency, openness. Each word is a pressure point. “Highest quality technical work” signals the prime directive: protocols that don’t break the Internet. “Efficient” is the concession to reality - volunteer time is scarce, and shipping late is its own form of failure. “Open” is the anti-capture clause, a warning against the gravitational pull of big vendors, inside baseball, and informal gatekeeping disguised as “culture.”

The final clause is the real tell: “inviting to new people.” That’s not community-theater niceness; it’s succession planning and security hygiene. An aging, insular standards body becomes brittle, easy to dominate, slow to notice new threats, and out of step with how the network is actually used. Crocker’s subtext is governance as resilience: if you want durable technical truth, you need a process that survives personalities, budgets, and the next wave of outsiders who will see today’s assumptions as quaint.