More than 1,300 people from 56 countries came to Paris, France, and actively engaged in developing the future of the Internet. It was exciting to see so many people collaborating.
IETF 83 was very well attended. Of course, Paris in the springtime is an attractive location, but people came to work with others to make the Internet better for everyone.
Until the last minute, we did not have a host for IETF 83. We held a t-shirt-design contest, and IETF participants selected the winning design. With little time to spare, Cisco stepped forward and sponsored the meeting. Many thanks! Dave Ward was recognized at the plenary meeting on Wednesday for his role in making this happen. He was awarded a “Super Host” cape, which was designed and sewn by Amy Vezza from the IETF Secretariat.
Our sponsors played an important role in making IETF 83 successful. AFNIC, NBCUniversal, Scality, and Tail-f served as meeting sponsors. Orange sponsored the network connectivity. Huawei sponsored the welcome reception. Thanks to all for your support.
Since IETF 82, three working groups (WGs) have been chartered and five have closed—our count remains steady at 115 WGs. Between meetings, the WGs and their individual contributors produced 576 new Internet-Drafts and updated 1,144 existing Internet-Drafts, some more than once. The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) approved 125 Internet-Drafts for publication as RFCs. The RFC Editor published 115 new RFCs.
IETF tools continue to improve. The second major update to the Datatracker was released shortly before IETF 83, providing a major upgrade to the database schema. The new schema allows volunteers and contractors to more easily provide new capabilities. Support for WG chartering and rechartering activities was released in May. A significant enhancement that will allow anyone in the community to track the status of documents of interest will be released by the time this article is published.
There’s been a lot of hype about “big data” on the Internet. Despite the hype, there are some real technical challenges associated with big data, and some people think that the IETF is a good place to tackle them. In my opinion, the IETF is very well suited to address many of them. If you agree, please put forward your ideas for BoFs (birds-of-a-feather meetings) in this area.
IETF 84 will take place in Vancouver, BC, Canada, from 29 July–3 August 2012. Google will be the host. Scheduling information for the upcoming IETF meetings can always be found at http://www.ietf.org/meeting/. I look forward to seeing you in Vancouver.
Dave Ward dons a “Super Host” cape, a gift for providing last-minute sponsorship for the Paris meeting.