[GGIE] Where from here?

["Leslie Daigle" <[e-mail]>]

I want to pick up the thread about whether or not we should see about 
establishing some more formal group at the IETF.  Also, see the bottom 
of this message for a history of the meetings we’ve had at the IETF, 
and attendance levels.  The table probably looks like crap in e-mail; 
better formatting and more detail (including links to notes!) at 
https://yana.techark.org/vig-at-ietf/ .

Now, a couple of words about what we’ve been trying to achieve with 
these “video interest group” meetings.

One of the things we discovered, while working on the GGIE proposal at 
the IETF, was that there are a lot of people who are doing video-related 
work, with and to Internet protocols at the IETF. Nonetheless, many 
people are not aware of each other’s efforts, if for no other reason 
than that the work winds up in different Areas — transport, security, 
art, and even routing.

It has seemed to us that bringing these people together so that there is 
greater awareness — of each other, of the work that’s being done — 
would help both the work being done, and the IETF as a whole. It can be 
pretty daunting to try to get one particular thing done in the IETF, and 
knowing that there are others interested in the outcome can be helpful. 
Also, the more we can raise awareness of general video interests at the 
IETF, the more likely the IETF is to recognize the need to address them.

We’ve kept on using the GGIE list for coordination simply because it 
spans those areas, and has 64 members who have, at some time, been 
interested in/working on video at the IETF.

So, that’s where we’ve been. Where from here? If the IETF had a 
concept of “interest group”, the way other organizations do, we’d 
pursue that. As it doesn’t, we can look at Working Groups or Research 
Groups.

Working Groups are generally chartered to achieve specific technical 
outcomes — whether it’s developing a standard or taking care of 
maintenance tasks on a deployed standard (like the v6ops and dnsop 
groups that someone mentioned). However, we haven’t been talking about 
an individual protocol/technology, and we don’t fit in a single area.

There are also some “dispatch”-style WGs, typically one per Area — 
if we had a Video Area at the IETF, we could easily set that up :-). 
That would suppose there is enough video work at the IETF (beyond the 
applications and realtime work currently being done) to have multiple 
working groups. Are we there, yet?

So then we come to the other obvious candidate — a research group. It 
would address the operational needs of finding actual time on the IETF 
schedule, and it would open us up to broader participation. On the one 
hand, it seems to fit because we are trying to bring together people to 
talk about a broad swath of advanced issues related to video. On the 
other — we’re explicitly not talking about research. We’ve been 
talking about stuff that is current protocol work, and active product 
and service development. To do a research group properly, we should 
actively solicit more input on the longer term work that’s being 
researched, related to video. While that certainly could be interesting, 
I’m not sure I see how it feeds back into increasing IETF awareness of 
video-requirements in protocol work.

The alternative, that we’ve been pursuing, is to keep doing the 
informal thing, until we have some kind of critical mass of IETF 
participants doing video work to have a clearer idea of whether there is 
a WG, or an Area, or something else that would better support the 
ongoing discussion.

Here’s our history at the IETF:

Video Interest Group					IETF 103 (Bangkok)	16	
Video Interest Group					IETF 102 (Montreal)  19
Video Interest Group					IETF 101 (London)	19	
Video Content Handling side meeting	IETF 100 (Singapore)	16	
Streaming Video bar bof				IETF 99 (Prague)		20	
Streaming Video bar bof				IETF 98 (Chicago)	62
GGIE at DISPATCH WG					IETF 96 (Berlin)		N/A
GGIE Bar BoF							IETF 94 (Yokohama)	14	

Again — more detail, better formatting, at 
https://yana.techark.org/vig-at-ietf/ .


Thoughts?

Leslie.

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Leslie Daigle
Principal, ThinkingCat Enterprises
[e-mail]
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