Subject: Re: I-D ACTION:draft-iab-mpls-tp-uncoord-harmful-00.txt

From: Dave CROCKER <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 20:59:28 +0200

[email-masked] wrote:
>          In particular, this was
>    achieved via the establishment of the "Joint working team on MPLS-TP"
>    which was the first ever joint ITU/IETF group.  

How quickly we forget:

   ITU's T.37 and IETF's:

    RFC4142 - Full-mode Fax Profile for Internet Mail (FFPIM)
    RFC3950 - Tag Image File Format Fax eXtended (TIFF-FX) -
              image/tiff-fx MIME Sub-type Registration
    RFC3949 - File Format for Internet Fax
    RFC3192 - Minimal FAX address format in Internet Mail
    RFC3249 - Implementers Guide for Facsimile Using Internet Mail
    RFC3192 - Minimal FAX address format in Internet Mail
    RFC2880 - Internet Fax T.30 Feature Mapping
    RFC2879 - Content Feature Schema for Internet Fax (V2)
    RFC2542 - Terminology and Goals for Internet Fax
    RFC2534 - Media Features for Display, Print, and Fax
    RFC2532 - Extended Facsimile Using Internet Mail
    RFC2531 - Content Feature Schema for Internet Fax
    RFC2304 - Minimal FAX address format in Internet Mail
    RFC2301 - File Format for Internet Fax

were the result of an 8-year closely cooperative relationship between the two 
groups.

But it had an extremely rocky start that required careful negotiation to resolve.

d.

-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net

---

From: Russ Housley <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2009 10:31:30 -0400

Dave:

Can you offer a paragraph or so of text to go with the list of 
documents?  Are there any lessons learned or principles that need to 
be added to the list based on the this experience?

Russ

At 02:59 PM 6/10/2009, Dave CROCKER wrote:

>were the result of an 8-year closely cooperative relationship 
>between the two groups.
>

---

From: Gregory Lebovitz <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2009 08:23:58 -0700

Dave,Indeed, I second Russ' request. That sort of positive example / success
story would help the current interactions around MPLS, and this document a
lot.

Gregory.

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 7:31 AM, Russ Housley <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Dave:
>
> Can you offer a paragraph or so of text to go with the list of documents?
>  Are there any lessons learned or principles that need to be added to the
> list based on the this experience?
>
> Russ
>
>
>
>> were the result of an 8-year closely cooperative relationship between the
>> two groups.
>>

-- 
----
IETF related email from
Gregory M. Lebovitz
Juniper Networks

---

From: Dave CROCKER <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 10:25:57 -0400

Russ Housley wrote:
> documents?  Are there any lessons learned or principles that need to be 
> added to the list based on the this experience?

Best I can do is 3 paragraphs, given a rather complex background and dynamics 
for the effort.  Glad to iterate this, to make it more useful for your purposes...

The ITU-T is responsible for developing and enhancing standards at the core of 
the considerable telephone-based facsimile industry. With the potential for 
massive savings in telephon charges, emergence of the Internet raised an obvious 
interest in developing standards for conducting facsimile exchanges over the 
net. One approach is to simulate a real-time telephone call and this has been 
pursued as T.38. The other approach is T.37, which translates fax semantics into 
store-and-forward email exchanges. T.37 was the result of close collaboration 
between the IETF and the ITU, through an incremental set of specification 
developed over 8 years.

Some facsimile vendors informally approached the IETF, based on the email focus, 
and this generated the IETF Fax working group with extensive fax experts 
participating in the IETF effort, including one senior fax participant as chair 
and one senior email participant as chair.  In spite of this promising 
structuring and activity, an early and aggressive turf war developed, given that 
the topic really did require deep expertise in two different -- and quite 
different -- technologies, with each having a home in a different standards body.

Luckily, the motivation to achieve a workable emulation was stronger than the 
desire for sustained political inter-fighting and so the combined community was 
able to agree on an unexpected, but productive, arrangement:  Because the ITU 
had some aggressive institutional deadlines and, of course, the fax expertise in 
the details of facsimile, it had the tasks of setting the basic technical 
requirements and the project delivery deadline. The IETF had the email expertise 
it was increasing evident that the technical work really was to produce an email 
"emulation" of facsimile.  So the IETF working group was tasked with developing 
the detailed specifications to be within scope and within the deadline. In order 
to meet the aggressive, initial deadline, the group agreed to to make the first 
set of specification as constrained as practical. Incremental improvements were 
specified through two follow-on rounds of effort. In order to eliminate the 
possibility of divergence, the ITU agreed to make T.37 incorporate the IETF work 
by reference, rather than by copying the text.

d/

-- 

   Dave Crocker