[Dawn] Re: A reworked draft charter for DAWN

[Hesham Moussa <[e-mail]>]

Hi Wes,

Thank you for the response.

I understand the fine line you were aiming to walk regarding DNS, and I agree that the current wording reflects that balance well. That said, I still believe it would be valuable for the working group to explicitly include, as a mandate or deliverable, the task of identifying which protocols are suitable to build upon.

I will admit I may be a bit biased here, as there is a draft with my name on it that provides a gap‑analysis that outlines an approach for evaluating different options and assessing their suitability for meeting DAWN requirements. The draft is available here: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-moussa-dawn-gap-analysis/01/ , and feedback is of course very welcome 😊.

Just my two cents here, but I think this work highlights why such a mandate could be important. It could even serve as an informational deliverable. It would help provide a clear, well‑reasoned basis for why a particular protocol was chosen as the starting point, or why multiple protocols might be needed if no single option proves to be a one‑size‑fits‑all solution, or why a certain protocol is absolutely needed to start the discovery process. 

Not sure what the community thinks, but of course, the final direction will ultimately come from the BOF discussion and the IESG.

Regards,  
Hesham


-----Original Message-----
From: Wes Hardaker <[e-mail]> 
Sent: Monday, June 22, 2026 11:28 AM
To: Hesham Moussa <hesham.moussa=[e-mail]>
Cc: [e-mail]; [e-mail]; [e-mail]; 'Eric Vyncke (evyncke)' <[e-mail]>
Subject: [Dawn] Re: A reworked draft charter for DAWN

Hesham Moussa <hesham.moussa=[e-mail]> writes:

Hi Hesham,

> “Although initially focused on discovery of AI agents, agentic tools, 
> and agentic skills, the WG is expected to produce results that are 
> general and reusable within other discovery contexts whenever 
> possible.”

I think this is reasonable and have changed the text in the repo to adapt to this.  In the end, of course, it's up to the BOF discussion and the IESG to come to an agreement about the right scope.  An overly broad scope in starting charters rarely does well, so we need to be cautious about allowing a completely open set of work items.  Or to put it another way, initial charters should concentrate on the initial needed building steps and building blocks (only).

> Regarding the DNS sentence , “The WG will consider the DNS as a likely 
> initial protocol upon which to build a discovery protocol.”

Both you and Nic brought this up (in different ways).  A few comments:

[note: this is all IMHO, not coordinated with Adrian's opinions]

We received specific guidance from the IESG that the DNS needs to be considered as a target protocol and the conversations have generally leaned that way.  In many ways it would be hard to start the discovery process without the DNS.  But that doesn't mean other options shouldn't be considered, or that the DNS shouldn't be used just as an initial bootstrap and fall to other protocols for doing the larger bulk transfer of information needed (the DNS simply isn't designed to transfer a huge amount of information that a full discovery mechanism may need).

So I wrote that sentence to carefully try to walk the line of saying "the DNS must be at least considered as a starting point in a discovery process" while at the same time trying to say "but other options can be considered" and "the DNS doesn't have to be the sole protocol used in the final design".


--
Wes Hardaker
Google

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