I stopped by the Malt and Vine tonight and picked up some interesting dark beers (I am a huge fan of stouts, porters and dark ales), and while sitting here enjoying a Dogfish Head World Wide Stout I figured I would look at IETF statistics (I am a wild one!).
Jari Arkko runs a great website that tracks this, its worth checking out some of the more interesting charts he has are the affiliation chart, the historical affiliation and of course there is me.
The author stats dont show contributions to specifications where a individual or company is not listed as a explicit author, and there are general (unpublished?) rules around how many authors can/should be listed so contributors often are relegated to a un-tracked acknowledgement sections or no reference at all (one can check news group archives to find many of these folks, they do matter).
So, like all statistics take these numbers with a grain of salt; don't get me wrong they do provide value, with that being said some things are so exaggerated you can't help but notice.
For example, look at the author distribution for CISCO relative to their closest peer (its 2.5 times!!); this is no surprise to anyone who has participated in the IETF, its pretty common to go into a hum (a consensus process in the IETF) and see a room with a bunch of CISCO people in it.
Another interesting thing to notice is the number of authors in a given company, Microsoft has 65 (making them/us #5) while CISCO has 255 (They are #1 in participation); that's not to say that more authors is better or worse, like all things the devil is in the details.
A couple statistics I think would be interesting, probably more interesting IMHO, would be a historical trend of standard velocity (how long standards take to get completed in the IETF over time) another would be some metric that showed specification vs. deployment on the internet.
Well back to my beer.