[homegate] FW: homenet session approved

["David B Harrington" <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

The requested BOF session has been approved. That's the good news. 

But there are caveats. I am in discussion with the other ADs and IAB
members to get these requirements stated just right, but I can tell
you the rough consensus from the IESG/IAB review of the BOF Request,
so you can begin to work on addressing the caveats:

IESG/IAB consensus is to approve scheduling of a BOF session, likely
to be turned into a WG session. However, that session is conditional.
If the WG proponents do not get the charter modified to reflect the
following tighter scope, the session will be cancelled, and the WG
will not be created.

1) The (conditional) working group is authorized to develop BCPs for
the features vendors should include in unmanaged home networking
devices.

2) Recommended home network architectures, protocol gap analysis, and
protocol modification recommendations can be done outside the WG, but
these are out of scope for the WG. These can instead be developed as
individual (or non-WG design team) drafts. 

3) no protocol development is approved for the WG. 

A summary of many IESG/IAB comments:
- Taking on the problem of home networks is welcome, but the charter
is too relaxed. The current charter seems to provide license to do
anything. We should not approve such an open-ended charter. I do not
know why this as broad as it is. We need a charter that is tightly
scoped and well understood; this was the focus of the last BOF, and
the WG. 
- It is unclear how home networks differ from other networks. The
charter does not provide enough information to make that
understandable. The charter needs to delimit the scope better by
mentioning the unmanaged nature of the devices, and other properties
of home networking devices that will serve to limit the scope.
- The chartered topics of consideration (currently the seven bullets)
need to be much more specific about the known problems that will be
addressed by BCPs.
- Specific concerns from other SDOs, such as Zigbee, can be handled
through liaisons, or maybe a directorate to talk to. The need for
cross-SDO collaboration does not by itself justify the creation of a
WG for this purpose. 
- The proposed work seems more oriented to INT than Transport. 

--
I recommend the chairs discuss this amongst themselves, think about
how you want to modify the charter to accommodate the caveats, and get
back to the INT/TSV ADs.

Let me know if these caveats are not clear, and if I can be of any
assistance.

David Harrington
Director, IETF Transport Area
[e-mail] (preferred for ietf)
[e-mail]
[phone] (cell)