Re: WG Review: Centralized Conferencing (xcon)

At 11:19 AM 8/21/2003 -0700, Marshall Rose wrote:
> > As for Marshall's comments: there is certainly nothing nefarious about
> > having a large body of source work when trying to start a Working Group
> > (I cite XMPP as a recent example). What is important is for folks to
> > focus on the *charter text* and the desired output, rather than make
> > assumptions about the intent of those contributors.
>
> and, as has been repeatedly pointed out, the text in the proposed
> charter is rather poor. we now have four sets of people with entirely
> different interpretations (some from the SIP camp, some from the XMPP
> camp, plus the IETF chair).
Marshall,

I think the misunderstanding comes from your interpretation that when the 
charter text says "session setup using SIP" you think this means "session 
setup using SIP and IM and presence using SIMPLE".  You do understand the 
difference, no?
XCON requires a signaling protocol - that is part of the definition of the 
working group as *Centralized* conferencing.  A signaling protocol (not IM 
and presence protocol) is needed to establish, modify, tear down, and 
manipulate media sessions.  The nature of the streams will vary from RTP 
voice and video to IM text streams.  The IM text streams can be *any* 
protocol - SIMPLE, XMPP, or some proprietary IM protocol. XCON will work 
with them all.  Are you opposed to this?
If we don't use SIP as the example signaling protocol in our documents, 
should we use an ITU-T signaling protocol instead?  H.323, ISDN?  Of course 
not, we use an IETF proposed standard for session signaling, SIP.
Nothing in XCON is specific to SIP - I repeat nothing.  However, the 
documents will need to make reference to a signaling protocol, and SIP, as 
mentioned in the charter text, is it.  The likely output of XCON will be 
XML-based protocols that work at a higher level than any signaling 
protocol.  Are you perhaps opposed to the use of XML to control and create 
conferences?  This seems to be in line with the Jabber document which you 
have referenced a few times, which by the way, is exclusively limited to 
text messaging, which is a subset of the XCON problem space.
I propose wording changes to the charter which will make clear the 
distinction between SIP signaling and SIMPLE for IM - I believe this is the 
source of the technical disputes.
Thanks,
Alan Johnston
XCON BOF co-chair.


> > Marshall, if there is something specific that you don't like about the
> > charter as a generic conferencing working group, please propose
> > alternate rewording.
>
> that's easy:
>
>     1,$s/conferencing/SIP-based conferencing/g
> /mtr