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This article summarises a 2.5 day long Dagstuhl seminar on Global Measurements: Practice and Experience held in January 2016. This seminar was a followup of the seminar on Global Measurement Frameworks held in 2013, which focused on the development of global Internet measurement platforms and associated metrics. The second seminar aimed at discussing the practical experience gained with building these global Internet measurement platforms. It brought together people who are actively involved in the design and maintenance of global Internet measurement platforms and who do research on the data delivered by such platforms. Researchers in this seminar have used data derived from global Internet measurement platforms in order to manage networks or services or as input for regulatory decisions. The entire set of presentations delivered during the seminar is made publicly available at [1].

Over the last few years, we have witnessed the deployment of large measurement platforms that enable measurements from many vantage points. Examples of these platforms include SamKnows and RIPE ATLAS. All told, there are tens of thousands of measurement agents. Most of these measurement agents are located in the end-user premises; these can run measurements against other user agents located in strategic locations, according to the measurements to be performed. Thanks to the large number of measurement agents, these platforms can provide data about key network performance indicators from the end-user perspective. This data is useful to network operators to improve their operations, as well to regulators and to end users themselves. Currently deployed platforms use proprietary protocols to exchange information between the different parts. As these platforms grow to become an important tool to understand network performance, it is important to standardize the protocols between the different elements of the platform. In this paper, we present ongoing standardization efforts in this area as well as the main challenges that these efforts are facing.

The development of new technology is driven by scientific research. The Internet, with its roots in the ARPANET and NSFNet, is no exception. Many of the fundamental, long-term improvements to the architecture, security, end-to-end protocols and management of the Internet originate in the related academic research communities. Even shorter-term, more commercially driven extensions are oftentimes derived from academic research. When interoperability is required, the IETF standardizes such new technology. Timely and relevant standardization benefits from continuous input and review from the academic research community.For an individual researcher, it can however by quite puzzling how to begin to most effectively participate in the IETF and - arguably to a much lesser degree - in the IRTF. The interactions in the IETF are much different than those in academic conferences, and effective participation follows different rules. The goal of this document is to highlight such differences and provide a rough guideline that will hopefully enable researchers new to the IETF to become successful contributors more quickly.