Speaking of Standards

If you can’t get to Vancouver next week to join IETF 70, but you would like to stay up on what is going on, you actually have two options for following the sessions in real-time.

AUDIO - As they have done for several IETF meetings, the University of Oregon will offer live streaming of all IETF sessions. You may need to follow the IETF 70 agenda in order to know which session will be in which room, but this gives you a way to listen in as the sessions are in progress. They note at the bottom of the page that the raw audio sessions will be archived as well.

JABBER IM/TEXT CHAT - The IETF also runs a Jabber server with group chatrooms available for all the working groups. They provide easy steps to follow in the “IETF Text Conferencing” document available online. Basically, you connect in from your Jabber IM client to one of the groupchats hosted on “jabber.ietf.org”, where the chat room name is the abbreviation for one of the IETF Working Groups. For instance, I’ll be in the “mediactrl@jabber.ietf.org” early on Monday morning. The nice thing now is that GoogleTalk is XMPP/Jabber-based, so more people may have XMPP accounts (even if they don’t realize that they do).

Again, you’ll need to watch the IETF 70 agenda to understand which chat rooms will be active at any given time.

One caveat about IM - Whether or not the IM session is useful will largely depend upon whether someone in the room at IETF 70 will offer to act as a “scribe” and provide updates to people in the IM room. The scribe is updating people but also acting as a conduit for questions from the chatroom back to the room at the IETF meeting. At IETF 66 in Montreal this was something I did a couple of times and may well do so again here, depending upon my own schedule. Anyway, if there is a scribe for the session, the IM chat may be a useful way to stay up on what is going on. If no one will act as a scribe, well, there won’t be any meaningful communication.

That’s it! Two ways that you can join into the IETF 70 meetings even if you can’t get to Vancouver. Enjoy…

Technorati Tags:
ietf, standards, jabber

Out at IETF 70, the SIP Forum will also be holding their first “SIP Interoperability Workshop” on Monday, December 3rd, from 11:30am - 1:00pm at the Westin hotel in Vancouver where the IETF meetings will be held. From the SIP Forum website:

Co-located with the 70th Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Meeting in Vancouver, BC, Canada, at the Westin Bayshore Resort & Marina, Monday, December 3, 2007, from 11:30am-1:00pm in Salon B, the SIP Forum’s SIP Interoperability Workshop will serve as a forum to bring together researchers, engineers, and service providers to exchange ideas, share experiences, and propose approaches to address interoperability problems.

The SIP Forum is actively seeking participation from attendees of IETF 70, and has made an official call for papers.

The Call for Papers (which closed on November 27th) and other information about the event can be found in this PDF document. Here is the relevant section about the aim of the workshop:

SIP has been gaining traction as a preferred network signaling protocol for real-time communications networks. There has been a considerable amount of low-level protocol testing and interoperability, such as provided by the SIP Interoperability Test event, or SIPit, which is in its seventh year. There are many independent implementations of
clients, servers, proxies, back-to-back User Agents, registrars, and the like. In addition, there are significant network deployments, many at scale.

While this is all good, deployment experience is showing that interoperability is difficult to achieve. Products from a single vendor tend to work well with each other. However, multi-vendor interoperability, especially above the basic stack level, has historically been difficult to achieve. In fact, the proof point of the success of vendors attending SIPit indicates interoperability problems may not be due to the specification itself.

This workshop serves as a forum to bring together researchers, engineers, and service providers to exchange ideas, share experiences, and propose approaches to address interoperability problems. Particular focus will be on systemic or architectural problems, as opposed to simple implementation errors.

If the workshop identifies concrete proposals to improve interoperability that would require modifications to the underlying protocols, these proposals will be forwarded to the appropriate groups in the IETF.

I’ll be there on Monday… if any of you are as well, I will look forward to seeing you there.

Technorati Tags:
ietf, sip, sip forum, interoperability

For those of you who are also Facebook users, a friend alerted me to the fact that there is a Facebook group for the IETF. Like most groups inside of Facebook, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of activity happening within the group itself, but the group is a useful way to find other IETF members within Facebook.

I also noticed that there is a Facebook event for the IETF 70 meeting next week in Vancouver. If you are going to be there and are a Facebook user, here’s another way to potentially network with fellow attendees.

Technorati Tags:
ietf, facebook

Recently we came across a great series of articles at InformIT on the subject of VoiceXML. Written by Frank Coyne, they cover the range from an introduction to VoiceXML up through using VoiceXML with social networks. Nicely, the author mentions Voxeo and talks about how the exercises he lays out can be done using a free developer account on our evolution.voxeo.com site. Here are the articles:

• “An Introduction to VoiceXML“
• “Part 2: Working with Forms“
• “Part 3: VoiceXML Grammars“
• “Part 4: Grammars, Scope and Event Handlers“
• “Part 5: VoiceXML meets Web 2.0“

You can also get a list of all the articles as well as a blog entry from Frank Coyne back in August titled “Mashin’ Up with Voice XML“. To probably no one’s surprise, I was personally most intrigued by Part 5. Having done a ton of work with XSLT stylesheets in the past I enjoyed the part about creating dynamic Voice XML using XSLT stylesheets to generate the VoiceXML:

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1017851&seqNum=6

Linking VoiceXML to triggering Gmail delivery is also quite cool:

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1017851&seqNum=8

As I am personally just coming up to speed on VoiceXML, I’ll be working through many of these tutorials in my own evolution account. (Since accounts are free, you are welcome to sign up and check it out yourself.)

Technorati Tags: voicexml, tutorial, voxeo

I’ll be heading out to the 70th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, from December 2-7. If any readers will be out there (either for the IETF or in Vancouver in general), please do drop a note and let me know. This will be my first meeting in my new role with Voxeo and I’m very much looking forward to renewing old acquaintances and also getting more directly involved with the work of the IETF. RJ Auburn, our CTO (and my manager), will also be joining me there for the first few days which will be nice since he’s in our Orlando office and I work out of a home office in Vermont.

If you will be out at IETF 70, please do drop me a note. You can expect to find me in pretty much most all of the RAI (Realtime Appications and Infrastructure) area sessions (which includes SIP and other similar protocols).

Technorati Tags: ietf, sip, standards

Greetings and welcome to Voxeo’s new weblog, “Speaking of Standards”! I’m Dan York and in this weblog several of us will be writing about our views on industry standards. Standards - and specifically open industry standards - form a core part of Voxeo’s values and are something we take very seriously. Our VoiceXML platform has led the industry in implementing such standards as VoiceXML, CCXML, SCXML and SIP. Our CTO, RJ Auburn, chairs the W3C working group on CCXML and other staff members have been involved in various ways. Open standards are part of our DNA and so we look forward to talking about them here.

Some of you may be familiar with me from my own blog, Disruptive Telephony, or my contributions to the VoIP Security Alliance group weblog. I will still be writing in those other blogs, but in this blog I expect to be primarily writing about the work of the IETF, either draft standards I find interesting, new standards that are out, upcoming meetings or events and also commenting on how we implement various standards within our (Voxeo) platforms. I’ll be joined here in writing by a couple of my colleagues, but I’ll leave it to them to introduce themselves.

Your comments and suggestions are definitely welcome. What would you like to see us write about here? Do you have questions about the IETF or W3C processes? About specific standards? About SIP? VoiceXML?

Technorati Tags: ietf, sip, standards, voxeo