N-1-3-040.51, The IETF Users' Guide, by Gary Scott Malkin*, The last two years has seen an explosive growth in attendance at Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meetings. In July, 1990, the IETF met in Vancouver, British Columbia with 300 people in attendance. The most recent meeting, in July, 1992, met in Boston, Massachusetts and boasted 675 attendees. Growth has not been limited to just attendance. For example, the number of working groups (WG) within the IETF has risen from 38 to 46 within that same timeframe. Another growth indicator is the official recognition of the Birds of a Feather (BOF) groups, which were only informal gatherings until the December, 1990 IETF meeting in Boulder, Colorado. There were 20 BOFs at the Boston meeting this year. To top it all off, the number of WG/BOF sessions went from 49 in Vancouver, to over 100 in Boston. All of these statistics are meant to show the wealth of information an IETF newcomer has to absorb. Approximately 35% of the attendees at any given meeting are first timers. It is obvious, therefore, that there is a need for an IETF Users' Guide. This document would provide newcomers with the information they would need to acclimate themselves prior to their first IETF. In this way, they would be able to get more out of the meeting and, hopefully, contribute more. A document is currently being written within the User Services Area of the IETF to create an IETF User's Guide called, "The Tao of IETF". TAO is broken into three general sections: fun stuff, "required reading" stuff and reference stuff ("stuff" is the term actually used in the document, and should provide an idea of the document's flavor). The first section addresses the history of the IETF and how it has grown over the past six years, emphasizing some important milestones. There is a description of the hierarchy in which the IETF resides. This section also overviews the IETF mailing list and meeting registration activities. The remainder of the section is devoted to describing life at an IETF meeting. The second section provides additional detailed information on the registration process, IETF mailing lists, and IETF proceedings. It also points out ways to make attendance more effective. There are descriptions of the Request For Comments (RFC) and Internet-Draft documents and pointers to other informative documents. The remainder of the section is a list of Frequently Asked Questions, complete with answers. The third section is mainly an acronym list. It also contains the references and the Author's address. TAO will be pointed to in the IETF meeting announcements. In addition to residing in the RFC archives, it will also be in the IETF informational documents archives. *Principal Software Engineer, Xylogics