The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standard bodies; and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IP and Internet protocol suite. It is an open, standards organization, with no formal membership or membership requirements. All participants and leaders are volunteers, though their work is usually funded by their employers or sponsors; for instance, the current chairperson is funded by VeriSign and the U.S. government's National Security Agency.
See more at Wikipedia.org...
<networking, standard, body> (IETF) The IETF is a large, open international community of network designers, operators, vendors and researchers whose purpose is to coordinate the operation, management and evolution of the Internet and to resolve short- and mid-range protocol and architectural issues. It is a major source of proposals for protocolstandards which are submitted to the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) for final approval. The IETF meets three times a year and extensive minutes are included in the IETF Proceedings. The IETF Secretariat, run by The Corporation for National Research Initiatives with funding from the US government, maintains an index of Internet-Drafts whereas RFCs are maintained by The Internet Architecture Board. Home. (1999-01-27)