The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standard bodies; and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IP and Internet protocol suite. It is an open, standards organization, with no formal membership or membership requirements. All participants and leaders are volunteers, though their work is usually funded by their employers or sponsors; for instance, the current chairperson is funded by VeriSign and the U.S. government's National Security Agency.
It is organized into a large number of working groups and BoFs, each dealing with a specific topic. Each group is intended to complete work on that topic and then shut down. Each working group has an appointed chair (or sometimes several co-chairs), along with a charter that describes its focus, and what and when it is expected to produce.
The working groups are organized into areas by subject matter. Current areas include: Applications, General, Internet, Operations and Management, Real-time Applications and Infrastructure, Routing, Security, and Transport. Each area is overseen by an area director (AD), with most areas having two co-ADs. The ADs are responsible for appointing working group chairs. The area directors, together with the IETF Chair, form the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG), which is responsible for the overall operation of the IETF.
The IETF is formally an activity under the umbrella of the Internet Society. The IETF is overseen by the Internet Architecture Board (IAB), which oversees its external relationships, and relations with the RFC Editor. The IAB is also jointly responsible for the IETF Administrative Oversight Committee (IAOC), which oversees the IETF Administrative Support Activity (IASA), which provides logistical, etc support for the IETF. The IAB also manages the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), with which the IETF has a number of cross-group relations.

IETF working groups
Traditionally, the IETF has not had any legal personality; therefore, its assets (copyright in RFCs, domain names, etc.) have been held on its behalf by either the Internet Society or CNRI. In 2006, an IETF Trust was established to hold these assets, and ISOC and CNRI as settlors transferred these assets to the Trust.
The IETF Trust is described in RFC 4371 and the IETF Trust agreement

List of IETF chairs

Request for Comments
Internet standard
Standardization
IETF Working Group
Internet Engineering Steering Group
Internet Architecture Board
Internet Research Task Force