The work of the IETF remains relevant and energetic!
IETF 79 was held in Beijing, China. It was a very successful meeting attended by 1177 people from 52 different countries. Many visited China for the first time. The Chinese were wonderful hosts and the facilities in the Shangri-La Hotel were outstanding. Many working groups made significant progress, and it was a genuine pleasure to see so many talented people engaged and collaborating.
CNNIC, the Internet Society of China, and Tsinghua University combined forces to host IETF 79, and they did a fantastic job. The host team coordinated with nine sponsors to make sure that the welcome reception, social event, and all of the breaks were memorable. The food was amazing; as Barry Leiba said during the open mic at the plenary on Wednesday, “The food at the breaks has never been better; I hope we can have dim sum from now on.” The performances at the social event were amazing and memorable, as were the beautiful artwork and other artifacts in the museum.
Since IETF 78, seven new working groups (WG) have been chartered, and five WGs were closed. We have 124 WGs. Between the meetings, the WGs and their individual contributors produced 545 new Internet-Drafts, and updated 1003 existing Internet-Drafts, some more than once. The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) approved 92 Internet-Drafts for publication as RFCs. The RFC Editor published 108 new RFCs.
During the plenary session on Wednesday evening, the Itojun Service award was announced. This year’s recipient was Bjoern A. Zeeb for his dedicated implementation work in making IPv6 a first class citizen in the open source UNIX world. This was the first time that Bjoern was able to attend an IETF meeting. He was amazed by the dedication and hard work that he witnessed. Bjoern promised to return to future IETF meetings.
IETF 80 will take place in Prague, Czech Republic on 27 March-1 April 2011 hosted by CZ NIC. Scheduling information for the upcoming IETF meetings can always be found here. I look forward to seeing you there.