Getting Fidonet Technical

For technical information about FidoNet please see www.ftsc.org

The Future of Fidonet Standards
A proposal by Michael A. Grant
(1:134/10, 1:134/11)

Once upon a time, the Internet was small, and Fidonet was big. Then the Internet grew while Fidonet shrank. Somewhere along the way, Fidonet dropped the ball. What happened?

Perhaps one of the strengths of the Internet in comparison to Fidonet that has been largely overlooked by the Fidonet community is it's open standards process. Although Internet standards are defined by a professional association known as the Internet Society, the standards they define do not become standards unless they first go through an open discussion on the Internet via Request For Comments (RFC) publications. Only after the proposals in the RFC documents have been openly discussed and the programs utilizing those proposals have been found to be stable and in widespread use, does the Internet Society deem such proposals to be Internet Standards.

By comparison, in Fidonet we have had an elite group of developers working within the FTSC framework, one which encourages restrictions on who is an acceptable candidate for committee membership, and one which limits the input into FTS documentation to the committee members and the Coordinator structure. The FTSC does not openly request comments from all members of Fidonet on proposals, the way the RFC documents do on the internet, and it largely ignores the opinions of the end users of the programs developed, and even the opinions of some developers who work independantly of the FTSC.

The FTSC seems to have taken on a sort of elevated position in some people's eyes in this network; where a lofty and small group of individuals decide what is best for this network, and all the rest of us have to follow every idea that they come up with unquestioningly. Certain individuals in this network seem to want to push the idea that what the FTSC says, goes; and that no one can or should question the FTS documentation. Clearly this is a situation in which we are putting the cart before the horse. We cannot have true standards until such time as those standards are widely accepted by the members of this network, and a small committee cannot possibly reflect the opinions of the entire network's membership.

I'd like to propose that Fidonet adopt a similar form of standards development to the Internet model. I envision an "International Fidonet Society" (IFS) as the Fidonet equivalant of the Internet Society. Since Fidonet is an amateur network and not a professonal organization, this society should not be made up of professionals, but rather of anyone who is a member of Fidonet and holds a coordinator position, anyone who is involved in the development of Fidonet software, or any member of Fidonet who in some way uses Fidonet software in a server capacity, whereby other Fidonet members depend on the services of that member's software. (i.e. Fidonet mail hubs) In this way, the needs of the end nodes will be expressed in the IFS through those who serve those needs (being the coordinators and the mail hubs), and will also be open to input from any developer of Fidonet software.

Standards could be developed in a similar fashion to the RFC process. Any Fidonet member could make a proposal, and ask that it be distributed widely for comments and suggestions for improvements. I'd suggest calling such a document a "Fidonet Standards Proposal" (FSP), and such documents would be in a pre-determined format with a header that makes it clear that the document is meant for open discussion amongst the Fidonet community. If a FSP becomes gradully better defined and more widely accepted within the Fidonet membership, the IFS can then deem it a Fidonet Technical Standard.