The IETF RT Tracking System is a tool to help us manage document and protocol development. In the usual case, working group chairs or document editors will create a "ticket" for each issue raised. As the issue is discussed, new text may be appended to the ticket; additionally, at some point its state will change.
You might want to read the RT 3 documentation.
RT organizes tickets by "queues". In some cases, there is a single queue for an entire working group; in other cases, there is a separate queue per document. Clicking on one of the queue listings on the right hand side of your home page is basicly just a shorthand way of generating a Search query for "show me all tickets in the named queue with ticket status showing that they still need attention". This is often a handy way of getting a quick summary of a queue's status. Note that you have the ability to see all tickets in the system for any of the IETF queues.
One really handy feature of RT is the ability to bookmark an RT search query. If you find it annoying to have to wade through all the RT queues looking for the one that you're actually using all the time, you can just bookmark a URL that takes you directly to a search page (either the default one that you'd get by clicking on the queue listing or a customized one you generated yourself) for the queue you care about. You don't even have to log into RT before using such a saved query, RT will automatically ask you to log in if you don't already have a session established.
By default, queues are configured so that anybody can comment on an existing tickets, but only the queue administrator can create new tickets. Some queues are run differently; ask the WG chair.
Public access to the system (for non-administrators) is via an account named "ietf" with password "ietf". Because the same web page is used for administrator logins, all access to the tracker is via https. (If you use https://rt.psg.com directly, you'll skip this page.)
rt.psg.com uses a private X.509 certificate authority (CA), so you may see warnings from your web browser when you connect unless you inform your browser about the psg.com CA. You can load the CA certificate directly (you may have to tell your browser to "execute" the certificate to get it to load) so that your browser will trust certificates signed by the psg.com CA. We also provide a PGP-signed copy of the CA certificate and its SHA1 and MD5 "fingerprints", which you can download and verify on your own.
RT also supports a a mail-in comment facility. Messages sent to "rt+foo@rt.psg.com" (where "foo" is the queue name) will be treated as comments if they have the right magic ticket identifier in the subject line, and otherwise will be treated as requests to create a new ticket. Whether or not non-administrators are allowed to comment or create new tickets is configurable; the default configuration allows comments but doesn't allow new tickets. There's also a one-time email address confirmation step in front of the mail-in interface, to try to minimize the amount of spam that gets into the ticket system.