- visit the IETF RFC-archive site

- locate the RFC archive

- Choose and read RFC0030

- Summarise what you infer from RFC0030 about
(a) who could contribute to a discussion and
(b) what kinds of topics were suitable for submission as an RFC.

a/. Quote from RFC0030: " The Network Working Group consists of interested people from existing or potential ARPA network sites. Membership was not closed".

This would indicate that a reasonably wide range of people working in the computer industry were eligible to participate in discussions in the Network Working Group. The list of participants appears to be mainly from academic and research establishments. It seems likely that new people would have been invited to join as the discussion progressed and their institutions were possible future inclusions in the ARPANET.

b/. Quote from RFC0030: "The content of a NWG note may be any thought, suggestion, etc. related to the HOST software or other aspect of the network. Notes are encouraged to be timely rather than polished. Philosophical positions without examples or other specifics, specific suggestions or implementation techniques without introductory or background explication, and explicit questions without any attempted answers are all acceptable. The minimum length for a NWG note is one sentence. These standards (or lack of them) are stated explicitly for two reasons. First, there is a tendency to view a written statement as ipso facto authoritative, and we hope to promote the exchange and discussion of considerably less than authoritative ideas. Second, there is a natural hesitancy to publish something unpolished, and we hope to ease this inhibition".

In an attempt to encourage free, frank and open discussion, a wide range of topics was permitted. These included discussions and revisions, comments on previous RFCs, announcements of meetings and progress reports, descriptions of aspects of the network, requests for information and documents, details of mailing lists and notes from meetings.

- Locate RFC1000, which is an index of the first 1,000 RFCs. Go to the end of the document and scroll upwards for a few pages. Make a note of the different ways in which RFCs were used by their authors.

These are some of the line entries

- Discusses the Host software and initial experiments on the ARPA Network.
- Discusses various types of Links, including Control, Primary, and Auxilliary Links.
- Details the machine independent language DEL (Decode-Encode Language).
- Discusses transmission features, functional software specifications, and the Link establishment procedure.
- Revises the definition of style, content, form, and distribution of the Network Working Group's notes.
- Announcement that MIT is now to receive all Network Working Group memos.
- Comments in response to Kreznar's questions which were raised in RFC 17.
- Suggests alternatives in reducing congestion at swap-bound nodes.
- Reports on a new control message format which does not use the 7-bit ASCII character mode of transmission.
- Revises the definition of style, content, form, and distribution of the Network Working Group's notes. Replaces RFCs 10,16.
- Describes the ARC Clock system
- Network Meeting notes from 17 March 1970.
- An announcement of a meeting to discuss the Local Interaction Language system.
- Reporting activities since the Network meeting of 17 March 1970.
- Mailing list for distributing the RFCs.
- A draft request for comments of a resource sharing study that may be of general interest to network participants.
- Request for documents in the subject areas of data communications and communications theory.