Re: What can IETF do? Re: Further update on COVID-19

["Joel M. Halpern" <[e-mail]>]

Actually, I doubt very much that we have all the pieces to have virtual 
meetings that are as effective / useful / ... as face-to-face meetings.

I would not be surprised if we have all the tools to have useful virtual 
meetings for those cases when we can not or do not wish to have 
face-to-face meetings.
But we should also remember that assembling systemic solutions from the 
protocol parts is a different skill from the set the IETF tends to look 
for and use from its participants.  So it is not obvious how we get from 
here to there.

Yours,
Joel

On 2/26/2020 12:31 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> It is probably too late to get things together in time to have an impact 
> on COVID19. But let me remind everyone of what we are supposed to be:
> 
> An engineering organization that produces standards that allow people to 
> communicate.
> 
> This is the second time we have had a major fear of a pandemic in a 
> decade. There is a clear need to be able to hold really really good 
> virtual meetings and the technology is still not up to that.
> 
> I am pretty sure we have all the pieces at this point but we don't have 
> them integrated into a system. We have QUIC, adaptable video and audio 
> compression already. I have shown how we can adapt existing crypto to 
> provide end-to-end encryption. My colleagues Mallory and Hurwitz 
> demonstrated the lightweight semantics required to keep large meetings 
> (e.g. Al Gore's open meeting of 2,000 people) functioning.
> 
> What we need to do is to integrate these.
> 
> If there are people interested in working on that, lets get started.
>