Speaking of Standards

As I mentioned previously, there is some activity related to the IETF happening within the walls of Facebook. With IETF 70 over last week, I was both surprised and pleased to see that Tony Li over at Cisco had already created a Facebook Event for IETF 71 in Philadelphia on March 10-14, 2008. If you are a Facebook user, you can add yourself to the Event if you will be attending.

Now that I know the event has been created, it will be interesting to see what usage it gets in advance of the IETF 71 meeting. I confess to being a bit skeptical about the usage of Facebook Events and Groups for coordinating or communicating in advance of meetings. In theory, they seem useful, but because you only get notified of new wall posts or discussions when you visit the Event or Group page, I don’t really see the conversations developing.

In any case, it’s an interesting experiment and I’ll be glad to join in to see what comes of it.

It’s been a long and exhausting week here in Vancouver at IETF 70. Lots of good sessions… great hallway discussions… plans for work to do… I’ve got a whole number of posts that I’ll be writing up in the days ahead.

Right now, though, it’s 4:30am here in Vancouver and it’s time for me to start heading to the airport for what looks like about 13 hours of travel time back to Burlington, Vermont (I work remotely in a home office.) RJ is already gone as he had some customer visits yesterday and today before he heads back to Orlando.

It’s been a great meeting… the next on will be IETF 71 in March in Philadelphia.

Technorati Tags: ietf, vancouver

Out here at IETF 70 in Vancouver, British Columbia, I decided to continue our experimentation with video with this quick lunchtime interview with RJ Auburn:

For those curious, this was shot with my Canon SD1000 “point-and-shoot” camera, imported into iMovie ‘08 for editing and credits and then exported to YouTube (again using iMovie ‘08). Audio of the rain is a bit louder than I would like, but I’m just using the omnidirectional mic built into the Canon camera.

Comments about our little experiments are definitely welcome.

Technorati Tags: ietf, voxeo, rjauburn

Being a US East Coaster, I found myself up extremely early this morning and so I decided to go over to the Westin hotel and try a little bit of video. So here you have a greeting from Vancouver:

For those interested, this video was created just using the built-in camera on my MacBook Pro, edited slightly in iMovie ‘08 and then uploaded to YouTube using the “Export to YouTube…” feature of iMovie ‘08.

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

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