You bring remarkable people together. But are the connections turning into coordination — or just conversations?
For 35 years, the Internet Engineering Task Force has coordinated thousands of volunteers — with no membership, limited hierarchy, and entirely voluntary adoption — to build the infrastructure billions rely on daily. Come see how they do it, and bring those lessons back to your network.
If you convene a community and know the real value is in the connections — but you can't quite design for that yet.
If you lead a coalition or network with a coordination mandate — and the results don't match the potential.
If you facilitate gatherings and sense there are deeper patterns at work — but don't have the vocabulary for them.
You think you run a conference. You actually run a network.
You already know the networking matters more than the panels.
Every post-event survey says the same thing: the most valuable part was the connections. But most convenings are still designed around content delivery — speakers, sessions, breakouts — with networking treated as the thing that happens in the hallways by accident.
What if you could study a community that's designed entirely around coordination? Where there are no keynotes, no audiences, and no spectators — only participants working together on shared problems?
At the IETF, there are no keynotes and no audiences. Every session is a working group — people who showed up because they have a stake in the outcome, working through real problems together. The entire week is structured around producing something, not presenting something. That's the difference between a conference and a network — and seeing it in action is something no book or workshop can replicate.
The IETF is that community. And spending a week inside it will change how you think about what your own network could be.
What You'll Discover
An organization that shouldn't work — but does
The Internet Engineering Task Force is not well-known outside of technical communities. But for people interested in governance, coordination, and how groups sustain themselves over time, it's one of the most remarkable case studies on the planet.
How does it work without a boss?
No membership requirements. No gatekeepers. Decisions emerge through rough consensus — a form of distributed governance that has scaled to thousands of participants worldwide.
How has it lasted 35 years without burning out?
The IETF has sustained joyful communal labor for over three decades without burning out or centralizing. It has cultivated a zone of autonomy where deep collaboration thrives across organizational boundaries.
Does this actually produce results?
The protocols created here power the internet billions rely on daily. This is living proof that open, distributed networks can change the world — without coercion, without hierarchy, and without formal authority.
What You'll Take Home
Deliverables you can bring back to your board
This isn't just an experience — it's a set of tools and relationships you can use to transform how your network operates.
A coordination maturity diagnostic
A framework for evaluating where your network sits on the spectrum from "convening" to "coordinating" to "producing," developed from the IETF's 35 years of practice.
Governance design patterns with precedent
Not theory — documented patterns from the most successful open network in history. Rough consensus, working group charters, open participation protocols. Each one mapped to how it could work in your context.
A cohort of fellow conveners
You won't go through this alone. The learning journey is a small group of network leaders seeing the same thing, debriefing daily, and building relationships that extend beyond the week. This is your peer network for coordination design.
Kaliya Young as your ongoing bridge
Kaliya doesn't just guide the week. She's spent 20 years in this world and is actively translating its lessons for social change practitioners. The learning journey is the beginning of a relationship with someone who can help you apply what you see.
Why not just read a book about network design?
You can read about network design. You can hire a consultant. You can attend a workshop. But none of those let you watch rough consensus happen in real time — a room full of people who showed up voluntarily, working through genuine technical disagreement until they find something everyone can live with. None of them let you feel the energy of a community where there are no spectators, only participants. And none of them let you observe how a 35-year-old culture onboards newcomers, sustains motivation, and keeps showing up — year after year — without coercion or compensation.
That's what this week gives you. And Kaliya Young is the reason you can actually understand what you're seeing.
The Research
Patterns you can apply to your own work
In 2024, this research was funded by Summer of Protocols to investigate the IETF through several pattern languages — revealing coordination insights that apply far beyond internet standards.
Which research is for you?
Bioregional & governance practitioners
Sections 01, 02, 05
Action network & coalition leaders
Sections 03, 04
Facilitators & process practitioners
Sections 03, 06
Identity, Culture & Purpose
The first part of the research explores the IETF as a living system — mapping observations of its identity, culture, processes, governance, tooling, and knowledge to patterns from three different pattern languages.
Why this matters for your work: If you're building place-based networks or cooperative governance structures, this shows how a global community maintains shared identity without centralized control.
Regenerative Patterns
A thorough exploration of how the IETF is regenerative, using patterns from multiple pattern languages as lenses to understand how the organization works and sustains itself over decades.
Why this matters for your work: For anyone studying how organizations avoid burnout and maintain vitality over decades. The patterns here are directly applicable to bioregional initiatives and long-term cooperative work.
Working Group Dynamics
Working Groups are the IETF's engine — small, chartered teams that coordinate across organizations without hierarchy. This section maps the patterns that make them effective.
Why this matters for your work: If you run a coalition, a table, or a multi-stakeholder initiative, this is for you. Learn how self-organizing teams achieve consensus without formal authority.
Willingness to Experiment
How the core pattern of willingness to experiment and grounding in running code exists for both the technical protocols and the community leadership and governance protocols.
Why this matters for your work: Essential reading for action network leaders. See how the IETF's culture of experimentation creates resilience and adaptability in the face of changing conditions.
Joyful Communal Labor
How the organization sustains joyful communal labor within a zone of autonomy it has cultivated and maintained — and distributes governance across its participants.
Why this matters for your work: This speaks to anyone who has seen volunteer energy drain away. The IETF has solved something real here: how to keep collective work joyful and generative.
Ritual & Flow of Meetings
How the ritual and flow of week-long meetings embody patterns from the Group Works Deck — a pattern language for bringing life to meetings and gatherings.
Why this matters for your work: For facilitators and process practitioners: this explicitly maps IETF practices to the Group Works Deck. If you use pattern languages in your work, start here.
Read the full report
Version 1.0 of the research paper is available as a PDF.
Your Guide Between Two Worlds
The IETF is a deeply technical community. Walking in cold, you'd be lost before the first coffee break.
That's why this learning journey exists — and why Kaliya Young is the one leading it. You can only access this because she can translate it.
Kaliya Young
Kaliya is one of the rare people who has spent decades inside both the internet standards world and the social change ecosystem. In 2005, she co-founded the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW), an unconference community whose work produced foundational internet standards including OpenID Connect, OAuth, Verifiable Credentials, and Decentralized Identifiers — protocols now used by billions of people worldwide.
Beyond her standards work, Kaliya is a practiced network convener. She co-founded She's Geeky and the Thoughtful Biometrics Workshop, and has spent 20+ years stewarding communities at the frontier of digital rights and internet governance. She conducted the research that makes the IETF's coordination patterns visible and transferable.
She's guiding this learning journey because she believes the IETF community's track record — small, dedicated networks producing infrastructure that shapes the entire internet — holds powerful lessons for what social change networks can achieve when they operate with the same intentionality and craft.
Co-Host
David Hodgson
David has spent years studying why some networks produce real outcomes and others just produce meetings. He founded the Global Regeneration CoLab — a 1,200-member community of leaders in ecological regeneration — and built mycelial.earth, a platform designed as the operating system for impact networks.
What draws David to this learning journey is the same question you're probably asking: how do you design a network that actually coordinates, not just convenes? The IETF changed how he thinks about network structure and governance, and he's here to help you make those same connections to your own work.
Who's Already Finding This Useful
Communities already engaging with this research
The research has been shared across governance, regenerative, and civic innovation communities — each finding different insights relevant to their work.
Featured
Global Regeneration CoLab
Regenerative Governance & the IETF · February 2025
This talk was designed for regenerative network practitioners, bioregional leaders, and people building cooperative governance structures. Kaliya presented the IETF research to a room full of people working on similar coordination challenges in different contexts.
Interested in joining us?
If you are interested in coming on our guided tour to understand the processes and culture of the IETF, sign up here to express your interest and we'll be in touch soon.