Subject: RE: participation in IETF meetings

From: "Harrington, David" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 10:49:56 -0400

Hi,

I am sending this message with trepidation. I think this discussion may have
already gone on longer than necessary. I'm not seeing a lot of new stuff
being put forth. I don't want to get myself into one of these endless
discussions.

However, I haven't seen anybody put forth the benefit of allowing
presentations that are effectively tutorials on that directions and the
status of the work being done. I think those presentations are important. So
I'll put forth my opinion, and then I'll go away.

Networks have become tremendously important to business, and technical
leaders for companies need to assess the upcoming technology directions and
prepare their company to accept and use the upcoming standards. 

Most vendors do not wait until a technology is officially blessed as a full
standard to put it into their products and sell it to customers. When
customers are presented with a new technology and no background information
except that provided by a company trying to sell their productized version
of the technology, those customers are left in a bad spot.

Quite often, new technologies will have a significant impact on the
resourecs organization of a company - the division into different types of
work forces, the budgets for rolling out products based on new technologies.

Technical leaders for companies need to anticipate the disruptive impact of
new technologies. Some in-development technologies that will impact
companies deeply include instant messaging, mobile IP, secure networking,
real time video, and the convergence of voice and IP networks. These can
have a tremendous impact on the way a company does business. Others may only
impact the IT department that is expected to manage new technologies - the
management of end-to-end encrypted tunnels, managing networks with NAT,
dynamic IP addressing, connecting to an IPv6 Internet.

A company that doesn't pay attention to these trends could lose out on the
productivity gains and technologies that can help them contain costs and
improve internal communications. 

The IETF doesn't do marketing, so once a technology beginhs to advance on
the standards track, the IETF will not go out and promote it publicly. We
build better mousetraps, and expect them to sell themselves. Anybody with a
business background knows the folly of that approach. Rather what we do is
build a better mousetrap and hope that enough people will be interested in
the technology to develop products and promote them, and that enough press
will become aware of the new technologies and promote it for us.

One of the best ways to make the press, industry analysts, and company IT
leaders aware of the standard is to provide an easy-to-understand
presentation about the directions of the effort, the current status, and the
challenges to be resolved before it will be ready to fly.

I suggest that a useful approach, especially if there are multiple sessions
booked for a WG, is to start the first session with an overview of the
directions, status, and challenges that is presented in a way that will be
useful to the dedicated designers of the protocol as a review, but will also
be useful to those who come in to learn what the protocol development is
about or what the current status is. After that presentation, announce that
all further work during the meeting will be detailed technical information,
and those who aren't interested in working on the specifications can feel
free to leave. When the large mass of unprepared attendees leave, what
remains is a more prepared group ready to work on the detailed
specifications. The prepared can get more work done without the constant
interruption of questions from those that are unprepared. That approach
meets the goals of both types of attendees.

So, I think there is a place for the pretty presentation for those who are
not protocol designers. They just need to be kept limited in time and
clearly identified as the overview portion of the meeting to allow real work
to be done during the bulk of the meeting time alloted.

my $.02
dbh

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Donald E. Eastlake 3rd [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2001 9:06 AM
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: participation in IETF meetings 
> 
> 
> 
> I dunno. I've seen people successfully show a small subset of the
> slides in a larger presentation.  And I've seen people successfully
> use Power Point to take real time publicly displayed minutes recording
> issues raised and tentative decisions made, although I don't try to do
> that myself...
> 
> Advice is fine but I don't want there to be one set of mandatory rules
> on exactly what format Working Group meetings can be and what software
> people can use. If the WG memebers are happy and the WG is making
> reasonable progress and following the current broad guidelines, what's
> the problem?
> 
> Donald
> 
> From:  [email-masked]
> Date:  Tue, 23 Oct 2001 22:03:24 -0700 (PDT)
> In-reply-to:  "Your message dated Tue, 23 Oct 2001 15:10:25 -0400"
> 	      <[email-masked]>
> To:  Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
> Cc:  Edward Lewis <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]
> Message-id:  <[email-masked]>
> Content-type:  TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=us-ascii
> Content-transfer-encoding:  7BIT
> References:  
> <[email-masked]>
> 	     <[email-masked]>
> 	     <a05100312b7fb296b2c87@[216.43.25.67]>
> 	     <[email-masked]>
> 	     <[email-masked]>
> 	     <[email-masked]>
> 	     <v03130301b7fb63d4d10c@[65.174.249.227]>
> Content-Transfer-Encoding:  7BIT
> >> At 02:21 PM 10/23/01 -0400, Edward Lewis wrote:
> >> >One of my soapboxes is that blind hatred of MS products 
> is as determintal
> >> >as the products themselves.  ;)
> >
> >> I'm not sure what that has to do with the question at hand.
> >> That the use of Powerpoint tends to lead to a uniformity of
> >> structure and undermines the speaker's ability to improvise
> >> to suit the context isn't the result of a blind hatred of
> >> MS products (and I think you should reconsider your use of
> >> the word "blind").  Have you ever *tried* to get someone
> >> who's put together a PP presentation that's inappropriate
> >> for a working group meeting to cut out the presentation
> >> material and skip to the issues?
> >
> >I can't say I've had this particular experience, but on 
> quite a few occasions
> >I've watched people try to use a PowerPoint presentation as 
> a basis for some
> >other sort of talk. Usually it is all I can do to keep a 
> straight face.
> >
> >				Ned
>

---

From: Pete Resnick <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 11:22:58 -0500

On 10/24/01 at 10:49 AM -0400, David Harrington wrote:

>I suggest that a useful approach, especially if there are multiple 
>sessions booked for a WG, is to start the first session with an 
>overview of the directions, status, and challenges that is presented 
>in a way that will be useful to the dedicated designers of the 
>protocol as a review, but will also be useful to those who come in 
>to learn what the protocol development is about or what the current 
>status is.

In all honesty, I don't think anyone objects to the existence of such 
sessions in general; it's just we don't want to use the limited time 
we have at IETF meetings to do this. We've talked in the past about 
having tutorial sessions specifically for this purpose to coincide 
with IETF meetings. Resources, however, are limited. IMO, having 
these sessions at INET meetings is appropriate. Having them at IETF 
meetings is not.

pr
-- 
Pete Resnick <mailto:[email-masked]>
QUALCOMM Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 17:57:01 -0700 (PDT)

> status of the work being done. I think those presentations are important.

So do I. Back when MIME was first created I came up with a presentation that
covered it. I then gave that presentation many times -- at InterOp, eMail
World, DECUS, EMA, etc.  As MIME evolved and things were added I updated the
presentation accordingly and continued giving it.

But I never gave that presentation at an IETF. Why? Because the IETF is a venue
to get standards work done. It is not a venue to give presentations about
standards work that has already been done. There are lots of other venues where
such presentations are appropriate; the IETF just isn't one of them.

Now, some people have suggested making time at IETF meetings for this sort of
thing. I'm sorry, but this just doesn't work out. Our meetings already tend to
max out the people involved; making them longer just isn't viable. And the
existing meeting time is already oversold. We're at our limit in all sorts of
ways, and even if we were to find some way to cram a little more in I wouldn't
add introductory presentations to the mix.

> will become aware of the new technologies and promote it for us.

Actually, quite a few of us do what we can to promote the technologies we
develop, independent of specific products and IETF press coverage (which I must
say has gotten a lot better over the years).

> challenges to be resolved before it will be ready to fly.

Absolutely. Such presentations are vital. The IETF just isn't the place for
them.

				Ned

---

From: Paul Hoffman / VPNC <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 19:20:11 -0700

Ned is right: such presentations are needed, but the IETF is not the 
place to give them. Your message focused on educating end users, and 
I'll assume you mean advanced end users, such as mid- to high-level 
IS staff.

There are already many venues that do very good education about 
standards for those folks. Networld+Interop is a great example of 
this. The education tracks there span novice to advanced, and the 
selection process for the speakers is pretty rigorous. Lots of the 
sessions cover standards, not products, and those sessions are often 
well-attended.

Some technology-specific conferences also have good education tracks 
that cover standards. For example, VPNcon (in which Enterasys 
participated just last week) does a good job of this for IPsec. Some 
important protocols have no good technology-specific conferences 
(Internet mail, unfortunately, comes to mind), but those topics are 
still covered at shows like Networld+Interop, ComNet, and so on.

If a company wants to start an educational event focusing on 
standards, they would certainly be able to draw from the IETF for 
presenters. But sending folks to the IETF to learn about the 
standards in process isn't a good use of the IETF's limited bandwidth.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium