Russ Housley 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?
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
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
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