Subject: [ogpx] VWRAP working group charter update

From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:30:38 -0400

I have an administrative update about the VWRAP charter:
It's moving along apace, and will be discussed on this week's IESG
telechat on Thursday.  That means that the working group may be
chartered imminently, a good 2 to 4 weeks sooner than I'd anticipated.
 Many thanks to Alexey Melnikov for moving it ahead quickly for us!

Now, let's not count chicken avatars yet, because nothing is certain
until it's done, and we're past the nominal deadline for session
requests at IETF 76 anyway, but:
- It's likely that we'll be chartered soon enough.
- We can probably get a session scheduled if I ask Marcia nicely.

So, just floating the question, for now: Do we want one?  If we have a
VWRAP session at IETF 76 in Hiroshima (the week of 8 November), will
people come?  Will we have work to do there?

Barry (OGPX BOF chair)

---

From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2009 15:15:36 -0400

No replies....
I know I only posted this yesterday, but I thought there might be more
response.  Please, if you plan to participate in the working group, in
general, I'd like your comment on the wisdom/value of trying to meet
in Hiroshima, yes or no.  If you want to participate and aim to be at
IETF 77 in Anaheim (the week of 21 March, 2010), but won't attend if
we have a meeting at IETF 76 in Hiroshima, I'd like to know that as
well.

Barry

---

From: Ann Otoole <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:52:02 -0700 (PDT)

Travel in real life vastly exceeds my current bare necessities budget. 
You do see the sad irony of having to travel in real life to discuss the standardization of virtual worlds so we don't have to travel right?

________________________________
From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
To: ogpx <[email-masked]>
Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2009 3:15:36 PM
Subject: Re: [ogpx] VWRAP working group charter update

No replies....

Barry

> people come?  Will we have work to do there?
_______________________________________________
ogpx mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ogpx

---

From: Kari Lippert <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:17:47 -0400

Sadly, you've stolen my reply!

Kari

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 3:52 PM, Ann Otoole <[email-masked]> wrote:
> You do see the sad irony of having to travel in real life to discuss the
> standardization of virtual worlds so we don't have to travel right?
>

---

From: Joshua Bell <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:59:11 -0700

Random thoughts:

I would see one of the primary benefits of having a session in Hiroshima as
reaching out to Pacific Rim attendees who may not have participated in MMOX
or OGPX discussions but are interested in the problem space but were unable
to attend the Stockholm meeting. At this point we can pretty clearly
articulate the problem space including the expected components of the
protocol suite, so getting others on board should be more feasible.

A discussion that might benefit from F2F discussion would be "drive by"
attendance from IETF peeps who could advocate for non-HTTP protocol usage in
places within VWRAP where HTTP is not a shoe-in (i.e. object transport,
bidirectional messaging, session initiation, etc.). Even where not ideal,
tunneling everything over HTTP/port 80 has so many benefits for uptake, and
hearing from implementers of other protocols on how they overcame challenges
(or gave up and tunneled over HTTP!) would be extremely useful. That said,
it's hard to arrange for that sort of attendance.

---

From: Carlo Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:58:06 +0200

Same here.

But, apart from that I cannot afford to (and also not for other reasons)
participate in real life meetings (outside my city and/or starting before
1 pm); I don't understand why this can't be done online... only knowledge
and data needs to be exchanged. Why is a real life meeting necessary?

-- 
Carlo Wood <[email-masked]>

---

From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:12:03 -0400

> and data needs to be exchanged. Why is a real life meeting necessary?

To be clear:
IETF process specifies that official work is done on the mailing list,
and so anything that's "decided" at a face-to-face meeting, on a
conference call, or over any other means (IM or VW, for example) must
be re-confirmed on the mailing list.

It is NOT necessary for anyone to travel to the meetings in order to
participate.

That said, the IETF holds three face-to-face meetings each year (and
some working groups hold interim working-group meetings; I doubt this
group will do that).  These meetings allow for a great deal of
high-bandwidth interaction and discussion, and usually enable us to
get a lot of work done that would be more difficult or more protracted
without the opportunity to get people into a room together.  We find
that people get a lot out of attending in person.

Assuming it's chartered, the VRAP working group WILL be meeting at the
face-to-face IETF meetings -- at least at most of them.  The question
is whether we should try to meet in Hiroshima, given how soon it is.
But I'll repeat: whether or not we meet in Hiroshima, and whether or
not you (meaning any participant) attend ANY of the face-to-face
meetings, have no effect on your participation in the working group.
You become a full participant merely by participating here, on the
mailing list.

Barry (long-time IETF participant, working-group chair, and former IAB member)

---

From: David W Levine <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:38:40 -0400

Face to Face working groups at the 3 meetings also serve to socialize the 
work
to the rest of the organization.  People casually sit in on the working 
group
sessions, and the cross fertilization of ideas is one of the biggest 
benefits 
of having the huge meetings. OAuth, the websockets community, and the 
XMPP community are likely to be of particular interest 

Most standards bodies do  a mix of work online,
face to face sessoins at major meetings, and smaller ad-hoc gatherings. 
The IETF
explicitly calls for anything discussed outside of the mailing list to be 
re-visited
on the mailing list, which certainly makes is easier to follow along. 

As yet, none of the virtual meeting spaces or tools fully capture the
simple power of people sharing a whiteboard in a physical room. The 
fluidity of interaction (especially in terms of casual diagram scribbling)
is a seriously challenging use case. 

I expect that we'll look to eat our own dogfood, and try and do informal
meetings inside a number of the virtual worlds. (Linden,  OSGrid. This
won't replace either the face to face meetings, or the mailing list, but 
should provide another way to advance the work. 

- David / Zha

[email-masked] wrote on 09/24/2009 07:12:03 PM:

> Barry Leiba <[email-masked]> 
> Sent by: [email-masked]
> 
> 09/24/2009 07:12 PM
> 
> Please respond to
> [email-masked]
> 
> To
> 
> ogpx <[email-masked]>
> 
> cc
> 
> Subject
> 
> Re: [ogpx] VWRAP working group charter update
>

---

From: David W Levine <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:42:35 -0400

In terms of the original question. 

If there is sufficient real work to be advanced, I can be at Hiroshima. 
Given
the expense and sunk time, I'd be looking for real documents to present
and discuss, and some reason to think that we'd actually have folks from
the Asia/Pacific region who were wiling to invest time in reading what's
in the document pile and offering serious feedback and discussion. 

- David / Zha

---

From: Carlo Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2009 02:09:21 +0200

Ok, ok ... but perhaps it's time to try a video conference,
or even just a 'skype' meeting for a change, without airplane and
hotel costs.

---

From: Carlo Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2009 02:16:25 +0200

> is a seriously challenging use case.

Agreed, but also that can be done online. In fact, I already do (did)
that online with friends sometimes that I meet in-world on SL in parallel
of "meeting" on a website with a whiteboard (were everyone can draw arbitrary
multi-color things in some white rectangle).

On other occassions I've had discussions involving complex mathematical
formula's, where yet another website was used that allows people to
"draw" formulas (paste LaTeX)...

One would think that at this day and age the technology does exist,
and since it's certainly a LOT cheaper it amazes me that there aren't
complete packages to allow online meetings with all the benefits of
a real life meeting. I can't imagine that such a package would cost
more than a trip to Hirosima, and it would be a one-time purchase.

---

From: Infinity Linden <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:09:35 -0700

hmm... carlo... for a second i was thinking you were saying "let's
never do another f2f meeting again. let's do everything virtually!"

but that's not what you're saying, right?

i can totally get behind the statement, "we should also have meetings
in the virtual world."

further, i think they should rotate between different grid operators:
linden, OSGrid, etc. i mean, this _is_ an interoperability spec.

i believe the IETF has the requirement that only people who have
asserted they have read and understood the IPR policy / Note Well
notice are supposed to be at "official" IETF meetings. in SL, we would
create a group, then make group membership dependent on confirming
you've read the notewell and then limit parcel access to members only.
i haven't ever tried to do that with opensim, but i'm guessing the
capability is there.

-cheers
-meadhbh

---

From: Charles Krinke <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:08:54 -0700 (PDT)

Dear Infinity and others:

You strum my heart strings when you mention the possibility of a meeting once in a while on OSGrid.

We have several regions we call "plazas", of which the key one is "Wright Plaza". On "Wright Plaza" is a conference room that can be used by anyone at any time. It includes screens that will load http pages and white boards controlled from the chat channel. It would be a wonderful thing to consider meetings there once in a while and in particular if one or more avatars showed up as OGP interop from the betagrid or maingrid, that would add some interest and fun into this while interop thing.

Charles

________________________________
From: Infinity Linden <[email-masked]>
To: Carlo Wood <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked]; ogpx <[email-masked]>
Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2009 6:09:35 PM
Subject: Re: [ogpx] VWRAP working group charter update

-cheers
-meadhbh

---

From: Alexey Melnikov <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2009 07:30:44 +0100

On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 2:09 AM, Infinity Linden <[email-masked]> wrote:
> notice are supposed to be at "official" IETF meetings.

The same applies to participation in discussions on this mailing list.

> in SL, we would

---

From: Carlo Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:43:33 +0200

> i can totally get behind the statement, "we should also have meetings

That is not what I was saying, in fact, a meeting in the current
virtual worlds only allows to exchange typed text and with some
effort from everyone perhaps voice, which is not enough.

I was just thinking that there should be (by now) an application
that one could download from the IETF website, say, which would run
on windows, Mac and linux that would allow "everything needed"
(video conferencing, voice, whiteboard, agenda, exchanging documents,
multiple groups/channels at the same time). Clearly such an application
does not exist, so ... it's good that some people are going to meet,
and bad that many won't be able to be there.

---

From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2009 09:20:44 -0400

> and bad that many won't be able to be there.

There is/are.  One is called WebEx, currently owned by Cisco, and the
IETF is experimenting with having "interim" working group meetings
through WebEx.  The IETF is certainly aware of these sorts of
requests, and that many people have trouble spending money on travel.

There's also a process to go through to set up working group meetings
through other means (even teleconference), which process is meant to
ensure adequate advance notice, open access to the meetings, and
proper reporting on it afterward.

With that, I ask that we close the discussion on alternative meeting
mechanisms for now, as it's distracting us from answering the basic
question for now, which is what to do (or not to do) for Hiroshima.
Please, let's stick to that question right now.

Barry

---

From: Morgaine <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Sep 2009 06:25:26 +0100

A visit to Japan paid for by one's company is not something to be turned
down, ever. :-)

And if a session at Hiroshima might yield some addtional recruits for the
mailing list, then that would be fantastic and should be encouraged.  I
think it's clear that the level of activity on the list seems a little low
at times, so having more people involved would help.

However, in terms of actual VWRAP workload which would benefit from an F2F
at Hiroshima, the answer is probably that there is very little gain to be
found at this time.  Most of the current participants are in high-bandwidth
daily communication outside of this list already, namely in-world and
through group IM in Second Life, so there is little or no extra work-related
advantage in a very remote F2F, no matter how nice the sushi afterwards. :-)

So to answer your question directly Barry, a spot of extra promotion for
VWRAP would seem to be the only work-related reason for attending Hiroshima
at this stage in the process.

Morgaine.

===========================================