Nature of the Hackathon (Was: IETF Hackathon at IETF 92, March 21-22, Dallas, TX)

[Jari Arkko <[e-mail]>]

Folks,

I wanted to clarify the situation with the Hackathon.

First off, this is intended to be an IETF event, for an additional opportunity to work on code, strengthen the linkage between running code and standards, and allow additional co-operation between the participants. The intent is to allow people to build and test what they want, and not have this limited in some fashion. The list on the web site is an initial guess which I hope interested parties can contribute to. Obviously we are hoping for technologies that are related to the things that the IETF works on, but I wouldn’t necessarily rule out work that is being proposed to be brought to the IETF, such as work related to BOFs.

The event has a sponsor, Cisco, who have volunteered to cover the costs. Such sponsorships are needed to arrange events or even the IETF meetings themselves. We greatly appreciate Cisco for offering to sponsor this event, thank you. I think it is appropriate to mention the sponsor, show logos, etc. as we do in other contexts. 

I do apologize for the late notice on this, and it is up to me really rather than Charles. The first ideas to develop something like this surfaced in Honolulu, and we could have provided information much sooner, had we had the time to work through a proposal late last year.

I hear the concerns about participants being able to change their flight plans loud and clear. There are also other meetings and events that IETF participants will attend during the weekend before the IETF. However, this is an experiment. I realise that we will not get as many participants as we would if we had announced this in Honolulu. But I for one would like to see what comes out of the experiment. If we have some people who find something like this useful, perhaps we can repeat the experience in Prague, with larger scale and more lead time.

And some of the confusion that we caused in thread is certainly useful lessons for future times. Please understand that we are learning how to do this. Where do we put event pages, what do we list on them, how much space do we need and will people show up, how much real new work will happen, are people too busy on the preceding days, … I do not have answers to these questions at this time. Maybe after Dallas we have some more experience.

Finally, I think the detailed content of this event could perhaps best be worked on a Wiki - the Code Sprint has used this model successfully. Perhaps moving the working areas to a wiki on the IETF server might be a good thing.

Jari