As stated in the IAB's charter, "[t]he IAB acts as representative of the interests of the IETF and the Internet Society in technical liaison relationships with other organizations concerned with standards and other technical and organizational issues relevant to the world-wide Internet." This responsibility is handled by the IAB liaison Coordinator(s). For formal liaison relationship (see RFC4052), the representation is carried out by liaison managers (see also https://www.ietf.org/about/liaisons/), who are selected and overseen by the IAB with the help of the IAB Liaison Coordinator(s).
The IAB Liaison Coordinator role is the central contact point for any questions or requests regarding liaison management based on the liaison-coordination@iab.org list (see further below).
The IAB Liaison Coordinator role is usually executed by a team of multiple IAB members (often more than two).
Within the team, one member typically serves as the primary contact; other members act as backup or take responsibility for specific SDO areas or tasks. Generally, it is possible to split up some of the tasks listed below between the assigned members as long as responsibilities are clearly assigned.
The team typically meets biweekly to coordinate activities, track statements, and maintain shared awareness. Currently, the liaison coordinators use a private repo on GitHub to maintain call agendas and minutes as well as to track issues: https://github.com/intarchboard/liaison-coordination/issues
The IAB assigns the Liaison Coordinator role during the process of selecting all of the annual IAB roles during its March pre-IETF meeting. It is recommended to not switch all members in the same year to enable smoother transitions.
There is no requirement to have knowledge about each, or even any, of the associated organizations (but see links to wiki pages for some below). Usually there is not a single person on the IAB that has that knowledge covering all the Standard Development Organizations (SDOs) with which the IAB has liaison relationships. However, it is useful for the role members to have knowledge about the liaison management process and handling of liaison statements (see also RFC 4052 “IAB Liaison Management” and RFC 4053 (BCP 103) “Procedures for Handling Liaison Statements to and from the IETF.”)
The liaison coordinator team is responsible to monitor the liaison-coordination@iab.org list and replies respectively if needed.
The list gets a copy of all liaison statements uploaded in the datatracker liaison statement tool. Internal follow-up discussions are also recommended to happens with visibility to the list, as the list is archived and this creates a (non-public) record.
Further, this list is the default announced address for incoming statements from other SDOs. If there is a responsible liaison manager incoming statements should be sent directly the liaison manager or respective alias address (see https://www.ietf.org/about/liaisons/), however, if received on the liaison coordination list, they need be forwarded to the respective liaison manager. Other incoming statements, that do not come from an SDO with an dedicated liaison manager, need to be processed directly by the liaison coordinators, i.e., recorded in the [datatracker liaison statement tool] and follow-up coordination with the recipients, especially when marked for action. After recording the statement it is recommend to send an informal email reply to confirm reception of the statement with a link to the record. Further additional informal email communication should happen when e.g. a statement was not address to the right group or other process related communication is needed.
There are chairs training slides about submitting and receiving liaison statements:IETF-123 wg chairs lunch (other sources: pptx on github, google doc in IAB folder)
Other requests regarding liaison management that come to the list might be answered by the liaison coordinators directly or
escalated to the IAB if the issue requires more attention or broader IAB consensus, e.g. like requests for establishing a new formal liaison relationship.
The IAB sponsors three standing coordination support groups:
The Liaison Coordinators are recommended to divide responsibility for supporting these groups among themselves. That means selecting one coordinator as the primary contact point of contact who participates in coordination calls/meetings, potentially reports back to the IAB and specifically supports the liaison manager, when needed.
The content of this page was last updated on 2026-03-06.