Speaking of Standards

If you would like to listen to what is going on at the IETF-71 sessions in Philadelphia the sessions will be streamed in real-time courtesy of the Network Startup Resource Center at the University of Oregon. (Tip to Comcast’s IETF71 site for the link.)

You can also join in the IETF group chatrooms to see commentary during the sessions and also to ask your own questions. Each working group typically has someone acting as Jabber “scribe” during the session who will type updates into the chat room and also pose questions from chatroom members.

So here’s how you can participate remotely:

1. LOOK AT THE OVERALL AGENDA - Browse the meeting agenda and find the session(s) you want to attend.

2. FIND THE WORKING GROUP ABBREVIATION AND/OR ROOM - This is the important part. You need the “Working Group” or BOF abbreviation to go on to the next steps. Let’s say that on the agenda you want to following the “Multiparty Multimedia Session Control WG” on Monday morning at 9:00am. The working group abbreviation is “mmusic” and it is going to be in room “Franklin 3/4″.

3. FIND THE AUDIO STREAM FOR THE SESSION - Go to the audio streaming page and look at the row for the room and the column for the day. You should see the Working Group abbreviation there. Click on the audio link for that room. For instance, MMUSIC tomorrow morning at 9am is on audio channel “ietf71-ch2“.

4. JOIN THE IM GROUP CHATROOM - To join the group chatrooms you’ll need a Jabber-based IM client which could be something as simple as GoogleTalk. If you are on a Mac, Adium works great with your GMail/GoogleTalk account. Connect to the Jabber server “jabber.ietf.org” and join the “room” of the working group abbreviation. For instance, MMUSIC would be “mmusic” (and the full Jabber name of the room will be “mmusic@jabber.ietf.org”).

5. LOOK AT THE SESSION AGENDA / MEETING MATERIALS - Look at the session agenda / materials list to see what is specifically being talked about and what slides might be available for you to view. NOTE: Session materials are often not posted until the session is ready to start (or sometimes afterward).

If you’ve followed these steps, you should now be listening to the audio for the session and also connected into Jabber where you can potentially find out who is at the microphone and - if you want - ask your own questions. If you have a questions, the “Jabber scribe” for the session can get to the microphone and ask the question for you.

A couple of notes:

• Philadelphia is in the US Eastern timezone. Note that we just shifted to Daylight Savings Time so there’s an hour timezone difference from yesterday.

• Jabber chat rooms will probably be empty until there is an actual session going on.
• There are Jabber chat rooms for the working groups but not necessarily for BOFs. It’s not always clear what Jabber chat room a BOF will use.
• When you join a Jabber chat room, if no one identifies themself as the scribe, feel free to ask. (Hint: It’s probably the person typing a lot.)
• Note that Jabber chat sessions are archived, so please realize that everything you say in them will be public.

All in all it’s a great way for remote participants to join in to what is going on down at IETF…. so check it out!

Technorati Tags:
IETF, standards