Subject: [Manycouches] tool development

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2020 19:33:34 +0100

I was wondering: 

I think there is a lot of improvement that could be
had if we had better tools for remote collaboration. And if one
leverages toolkits like RTCweb or the like, it may be that a lot of
that work is 'kinda' feasible to implement.

If folks here on the thread would know sufficiently many groups
that could design, code, experiment (either in their own org or
through partners), maybe there could be a request for a european
research project. We had IMHO a fairly good one a few years back,
starting (AFAIK) from IETF participants in TSV. This is the
H2020 NET project that also resulted in some drafts over there.

These EU projects typically have 3 years life-time, have typically 
7..10 participating orgs and would maybe get EUR 3 million.

Even if there might not be a well fitting bucket for this type of
work in the EU list of work items, i could imagine that this could
still be met with a lot of good will in the commission given how
it would be related to the CoVid 19 incident.

Cheers
    Toerless

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 Mar 2020 20:19:57 -0500

> 7..10 participating orgs and would maybe get EUR 3 million.

like ngi.eu?

Based upon what I saw/heard at FOSDEM about ngi projects, I think that it
would work well.  But, one project is thinking too small :-)

I believe that JITSI is open source, while I don't think that meetecho is.
If I had my way, I would want to fund a way for meetecho.com to become
meetecho.org, and then I'd want to fund three or four projects in a variety
of forum to merge JITSI's self-serve aspects and integrations, embrace and
extend meetecho.    I'd want to fund a project into both mechanical and
assisted simultaneous translation (because: EU multicultural/multi-lingual
foundations),  some project into translating emotions better, some project
into better feedback/diagnostics as to where the quality losses are
(including firewall blockages).    Backed by some expanded expertise.

--
Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>, Sandelman Software Works
 -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-

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From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Mar 2020 02:33:51 +0100

NGI looks like potentially the even better bucket to ask for funding from
for activities like this, but i really just looked for one minute,
and their site also lists H.2020 which our project was in back then
(which is going to be replaced by some XXX.2030 starting in 2021).
Probably better to ask some of the folks from europe in the IETF
which of the possible buckets/research areas one should go for.

I wouldn't worry about those details initially. What i wrote
wrt. the interested parties i more important initially.

You list some fun technical issues that could be worked on and
of course i don't think one should go into such a project without
the goal of making the output open source and already from the
beginning think about how to establish a community that carries
the work forward after the three years. That to me is ultimate
success of such public funded projects, and only few achieve that.

Cheers
    Toerless

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From: Larry Masinter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2020 22:57:41 -0800

IETF doesn't own the hotels or cater the cookies at a virtual meeting.
If we need solutions now, then relying on research funding to build
something the IETF can use 
... doesn't sound like a great plan.

Assuming the funding is there, I'd ask for someone to run experiments and
vendor evaluation and surveys.

---

From: Vittorio Bertola <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Mar 2020 14:22:37 +0100 (CET)

> Il 06/03/2020 02:33 Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]> ha scritto:
> 
>  

NGI is in itself a European project that got money (two multimillion grants, if I remember well) from the bigger Horizon 2020 bucket, with the objective of redistributing that money as smaller grants (typically ~€50k) for open source projects. It is a good channel to fund small/early activities as the bureaucracy is orders of magnitude lower than an actual European project. The caveats are that you have to fit their calls and that they make opinionated selections (you don't just need to meet the bar, they also have to think that your project fits their strategy for a European rescue on the Internet market). Happy to open up contacts if needed.

-- 
 
Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
[email-masked] 
Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy

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From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Mar 2020 10:28:11 -0500

Larry Masinter <[email-masked]> wrote:
    > .... doesn't sound like a great plan.

I think that you are mis-characterizing the effort required.
We already did webrtc, and it took a significant amount of time.
It is out, and it works well, except when it does not.
There are a number of verticals, (including meetecho) that make use of this.

What there needs to be, is a low-friction way for smaller teams of more
human-oriented (UX) people to do experiments. To fail fast as some say.

To put it in historical WEB analogy: it's 1998.  Browsers were out, some web
servers were around, but the CGI was still a standalone (perl) program.

We are there, except that when it comes to conferencing, we don't really even
have the CGI, let alone the django/rails/nodejs framework to make it really
easy to something.  Sure, we have webrtc, and js libraries, but they are not
modular with different servers, etc.  That's what we need in my opinion.

    > vendor evaluation and surveys.

Many of the vendor offerings are equivalent to 1998s' "DreamWeaver", "Flash",
ActiveX, etc..  They have few extension points, and you either ride their
bus, or you walk, there is nothing in between.  And we need at least a dozen
different options to play with for the variety of different scenarios that
we need.

It won't happen overnight, but it won't happen at all if we don't start.

---

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Mar 2020 16:40:48 +0100

> human-oriented (UX) people to do experiments. To fail fast as some say.

While i agree, i think the list of things we think we need is the first thing we need ;-)

> modular with different servers, etc.  That's what we need in my opinion.

I think you're skipping a lot of the higher level analysis that brought
you to that conclusion of the most basic underlying components missing.

Aka: i think the story starts at describing desirable conferencing
experiences such as what we did earlier in these threads -
visualizations of equivalents of desired in-person communications
patterns (hallways, death-by-powerpoint-streams, interactive-wg,
bits&beers, etc. pp.). Appropriate level of details.

Then we get to how to tool that. I agree that some set of SDKs to will
be extremely important  to quickly experiment with various of these
scenarios. In fact: IMHO we need the equivalent of hypercard for conference
experiences so everybdoy who wants to have an event can program it.

> It won't happen overnight, but it won't happen at all if we don't start.

Question is whether we could in IETF get enough people together to even
start doing what we can do: write it down. Even if its just a set of
requirements and design option considerations.

Cheers
    Toerless

-- 
---
[email-masked]

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From: Joseph Potvin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Mar 2020 10:45:34 -0500

RE: "I believe that JITSI is open source, while I don't think that meetecho
is. If I had my way, I would want to fund a way for meetecho.com to become
meetecho.org, and then I'd want to fund three or four projects in a variety
of forum to merge JITSI's self-serve aspects and integrations, embrace and
extend meetecho."

+1

If this were to happen, and IETF were to dogfood it, this could provide
good 'Plan B' [business continuity] utility for many international
conference organizers.

Joseph Potvin

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From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Mar 2020 11:47:50 -0500

I think that realistically, I need about $50 million to complete the
bootstrap infrastructure I am envisioning. I have significant resources but
not quite on that scale.

Government grants are not going to provide more than seed capital and it
will take a year or more before I could start hiring staff and their
programs tend to be overseen by academics looking for pure research. Oh and
the fact that I am clearly a political opponent of the current US and UK
administrations and the fact they are utterly clueless isn't going to help.

So that leaves me with two options:

1) Launch a kickstarter and try to bootstrap the system remaining cash flow
positive.
2) Hire someone who can write a term sheet and circulate it among the Angel
and VC community.

Before COVID-19, I was planning on the first. Now I am looking more to the
second. Recognizing the fact that some of the major players in the industry
might well provide the angel funding round. I have literally designed and
written a PKI that is about the size of SAML in five years. I am certain I
can get some first generation products sufficient to justify an A and B
round out for $10 million. That would be five companies for $2 million each
which they could expect to make back at a profit when the company was
acquired. And its open source stuff premised on not locking anyone out. So
they can still make use of the research.

A third option would be to try to set up another consortium like we did
with W3C only making it more of an X-Consortium, code writing play.

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From: Simon Pietro Romano <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Mar 2020 18:46:17 +0100

Hi,

> RE: "I believe that JITSI is open source, while I don't think that meetecho is. If I had my way, I would want to fund a way for meetecho.com to become meetecho.org, and then I'd want to fund three or four projects in a variety of forum to merge JITSI's self-serve aspects and integrations, embrace and extend meetecho."

Just for the sake of completeness, Meetecho is entirely built around an open source engine, that is the Janus WebRTC Media Server. You can find information about Janus here:

https://janus.conf.meetecho.com/

We provide users with a rich documentation, both about the server itself and about the APIs (JavaScript, REST, WebSockets, RabbitMQ, MQTT, Nanomsg, UnixSockets) programmers can leverage in order to “orchestrate” its behavior. 

Besides, there is a whole set of pre-built demos you can play with in order to get familiar with the system and its components. You’ll find them here:

https://janus.conf.meetecho.com/demos.html

The git repo is instead here (and has a large community of developers around it):

https://github.com/meetecho/janus-gateway

With the materials above, I’d say there’s a lot of dog food people can use in order to prepare their favorite IETF-compliant, WebRTC-enabled collaboration meal.

Cheers,

Simon

                     				            _\\|//_
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                    				Simon Pietro Romano
             				 Universita' di Napoli Federico II
                		     Computer Engineering Department 
	             Phone: +39 081 7683823 -- Fax: +39 081 7683816
                                           e-mail: [email-masked]

		    <<Molti mi dicono che lo scoraggiamento è l'alibi degli 
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> Il giorno 6 mar 2020, alle ore 16:45, Joseph Potvin <[email-masked]> ha scritto:
> 
> RE: "I believe that JITSI is open source, while I don't think that meetecho is. If I had my way, I would want to fund a way for meetecho.com to become meetecho.org, and then I'd want to fund three or four projects in a variety of forum to merge JITSI's self-serve aspects and integrations, embrace and extend meetecho."
> 
> +1
> 
> If this were to happen, and IETF were to dogfood it, this could provide good 'Plan B' [business continuity] utility for many international conference organizers.
> 
> Joseph Potvin
> 
>

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From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Mar 2020 16:49:35 -0500

> While i agree, i think the list of things we think we need is the first thing we need ;-)

You mean, you want to design a complex, interactive user engagement system using Waterfall Method.
1968 called, you might be in time to help design OS/360.

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From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Mar 2020 18:39:12 -0500

> 1968 called, you might be in time to help design OS/360.

That is a bit unfair, he did say think we need.

I remember my college tutor Tony Hoare telling us how the waterfall method
does not work.

Decades later I reported back to him that the waterfall method works great.
It is the most effective means consulting companies have found to empty
their client's pockets. As a $10 million list of failed projects a big 5
company was working on at one of the companies we had just acquired. Every
single project went in the bin because it was all design and no code.