Handling of Internet-Drafts by IETF Working Groups

The productive output of an IETF working group is documents, as mandated by the working group's charter. When a working group is ready to develop a particular document, the most common mechanism is for it to "adopt" an existing document as a starting point. The document that a working group adopts and then develops further is based on initial input at varying levels of maturity. An initial working group draft might be a document already in wide use, or it might be a blank sheet, wholly created by the working group, or it might represent any level of maturity in between. This document discusses how a working group typically handles the formal documents that it targets for publication.