Our plenaries were in the morning this time, as an experiment. The IESG announced that for our next meeting we plan to go ahead with one combined, shorter plenary as another experiment. The rest of our meeting time in Prague was packed with working group meetings, with time devoted to our regular topics such as real-time communications, security & privacy, or the Internet of Things.
This was the first meeting of the new NETVC working group that works on video codecs for Internet applications. Those codecs are the basis of browsers and other applications being able to exchange video streams in an efficient and interoperable manner. Our work on security and privacy continued, essentially touching all working groups at least to some extent. The dedicated security-focused working groups include, for instance, DPRIVE, that works on privacy for DNS queries; some of the designs from that working group were tested in the Hackathon. And the results of the 6TISCH and ROLL working groups were tested in the ETSI event.
The Bits-n-Bites event was very active this time. I spent some time trying to understand how I could install and test one of the open source projects that participated. This is the sort of thing that is exceptional at Bits-n-Bites: you can talk directly to the leaders and programmers of efforts, and get first-hand knowledge.
We also had occasion to observe ways in which the IETF meeting is intentionally different than a traditional industry conference. Where “promotional models” are still common at some trade shows, they were not received as a constructive addition to the technical Bits-n-Bites session. The IETF failed to be clear enough that this wasn’t appropriate. I have asked the IAOC to develop policies and practices to ensure that future meetings have clear guidelines to communicate expectations to sponsors and exhibitors.
On Thursday lunch talk series, Dave Meyer talked about the surprising combination of machine learning and networking. See the video here.