Harald Tveit Alvestrand (born 29 June 1959) is a Norwegiancomputer scientist. He was chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) from 2001 until 2005, succeeding Fred Baker. Within the IETF, Alvestrand was earlier the chair of the Areas for Applications from 1995 until 1997, and of Operations and Management in 1998.
He is an author of several important Request for Comments (RFCs), many in the general area of Internationalization and localization,[1] most notable the documents required for interoperability between SMTP and X.400. Since the start of the use of OIDs he has run a front end[2] to the hierarchy of assignments according to X.208.[3]
At the end of 2007 Alvestrand was selected for the ICANN Board,[4] where he remained until December 2010. In 2001 he became a member of the Unicode Board of Directors.[5] He was a co-chair of the IETF EAI and USEFOR WGs.[6][7]
Harald Alvestrand was the executive director of the Linux Counter organization.[8] He was a member of the Norid Board,[9] and the RFC Independent Submissions Editorial Board.[10] As of 2008[update] he lived in Trondheim, Norway, and has been working for Google since 2006.[11][12]
Publications
Best Current Practices
RFC2148 (BCP 15) Deployment of the Internet White Pages Service
RFC2277 (BCP 18) IETF Policy on Character Sets and Languages
RFC5226 (BCP 26) Guidelines for Writing an IANA Considerations Section in RFCs
RFC2438 (BCP 27) Advancement of MIB specifications on the IETF Standards Track
RFC1766, 3066 Tags for the Identification of Languages (was BCP 47)
RFC3932 (BCP 92) The IESG and RFC Editor Documents: Procedures
