IETF 101 Preview

The IETF returns to London this Saturday for what is shaping up to be a busy and productive meeting. With four birds-of-a-feather (BoF) sessions and more than half a dozen new working groups meeting for the first time, we can expect lots of lively discussion of new topics in addition to ongoing work.

Pre-meeting events

The IETF Hackathon in London is anticipated to be the largest one yet, with over 200 participants expected to be collaborating on more than two dozen projects. Hackathon projects span the waterfront of IETF technology areas, including topics where we've seen increased energy in recent IETF work. For those interested in IoT, for example, teams will be working on a variety of aspects of the problem space, including packet compression and fragmentation, semantic interoperability, and secure firmware updates. Similarly we'll have a variety of teams hacking on projects related to virtualization, privacy and security, WebRTC, QUIC, new email standards in progress, and more.

Folks are invited, as always, to join the Code Sprint on Saturday to work on tools for the IETF community. We're always looking for more volunteers, so please join!

Sunday afternoon we'll have a technical tutorial about OAuth, an overview of the transport area, and a tutorial about what makes a good Internet-Draft. Come learn from the experts!

On Sunday evening we'll be experimenting with a new event: the Request for Conversation (HotRFC) lightning talk session. Presenters will get five minutes and a slide or two to encouraging brainstorming conversations, find co-collaborators, raise awareness of relevant work going on elsewhere, and promote Bar BoFs.

Meeting week

The BoFs and new working groups meeting for the first time in London are tackling problems related to 5G, data center routing, security for IoT and group messaging, the IETF's administrative arrangements ("IASA 2.0"), and more. Check out the recent summary of new work for more details. Personally, I would like to encourage those who have an opinion about the future of the IETF's administration to attend the IASA 2.0 session on Tuesday afternoon. There are a number of options on the table that would involve changing the legal structure of the IETF administration and the community's input is needed to determine the path forward (see iasa20@ietf.org).

You can expect to see continued focus on YANG, security and privacy, and performance improvements throughout many sessions during the week. On performance improvements in particular, the latest round of Applied Networking Research Prize (ANRP) winners, Mojgan Ghasemi and Vaspol Ruamviboonsuk, will be presenting their work on the performance of video streaming and web page load times, respectively, in the IRTF open session. And the technical plenary will be looking at innovation and diversity in access network technologies and arrangements with invited speakers Leandro Navarro Moldes, Steve Song, and Jonathan Brewer.  

We'll be continuing the IETF Code Lounge experiment at this meeting. Anyone who needs space and time to informally meet to brainstorm, code, and test ideas can sign up for a slot in the Code Lounge, a portion of the IETF lounge set aside for such activities.

The spring IETF meeting is always a bit special as we thank our outgoing IESG, IAB, and IAOC members and welcome new members. At this meeting, we'll also be thanking our long-serving Independent Stream Editor, Nevil Brownlee, and welcoming Adrian Farrel into the role. On the IESG side, our outgoing ADs have put the pedal to the metal these last few weeks to try to get documents and working groups wrapped up before the changeover, and you can expect document processing to continue right down to the wire. 

Thank you!

We wouldn't be able to hold IETF meetings without the support of our sponsors. Big thanks to our meeting hosts, ICANN and Google! And to all of our sponsors for the meeting.

See you in London!