Remote Hubs in India

Remote hubs enable participaton without being physically at the meeting. Over the years, tools for IETF remote participation have become better. Starting with jabber and audio streaming initially, It has improved a lot and it is now possible to present remote using meetecho tools as well by providing enough notice to the meetecho team.

A remote hub is place where two or more people who are interested in the IETF gather and participate in the proceedings of the IETF. Proceedings in this context can mean seeing the presentations in a WG or presenting in a working group or attending any of the plenaries of the IETF. A remote hub can be set in someone one's home or office meeting room or some meeting room of a college or some other convenient place where people can congregate and discuss drafts, implementations and other issues related to the IETF. There can be multiple remote hubs in the same country and even the same city as long as there are interested people in hosting and participating in the IETF.

A remote hub is way for interested participants to come together and discuss drafts, implemntations and standards realted to the IETF. They are extension of the physical meeting in the IETF. Many times people cannot go to the IETF due to time, work or financial constraints. Also someone might be new to standards or unsure if they can participate in the IETF. Often academicians, ptotocol and software implementors and network engineers fall into these category. Subscribing to the mailing lists and meeting up with the local network standards enthusiasts is a good way to initiate people into the community. It also serves as a good way to network and learn from senior and more experienced people in the community about IETF structure and rules (written and unwritten). Often, local hubs might have an interesting perspective to add to conversations eg. protocol security in authoritation governments, internationalisation of names and identifiers, performance of protocols in low-bandwidth or high-delay networks. Some of these perspectives might be underepresented in the IETF and remote hubs is a good way to include them in the conversation to make more robust, interoperable and scalable protocols. For commercial organsiation, hosting remote is a great way to facilitate engagement with the larger local as well as international community. It is also a great way to attract talent and showcase new technology to startups and students. Since IETF often works on new and upcoming technology especially in the applications layers such as WebRTC, HTTP/2.0 or websockets, it is a good way to test and gather feedback about specific implementations. For academic instituions, it is a great way for getting students involved in open source contributions and implementations of open standard and help them in understanding real world sceanrios of deployment of technology. For eg, the BCP series of RFCs document best current practices from real world experience.

Most of the time, hosting or attending an IETF remote hub does not require much. You just need a comforatble space to follow discussions, a projector if it is a mid-sized or large group and a good high-speed network connection. More details follow in the sections below.

Often the people attending the remote hub are new to the IETF (either to the IETF itself or to the subject matter of the Working Group). In such cases, having a facilitator who describes past work in the IETF (earlier drafts or RFCs or discussion/debates) might help give context to newer partcipantsin the working group. IT is also a good idea to mail the partcipants beforehand to check the agenda and ask them to read the drafts to be discussed at the meeting and if possible to follow the discussion on the mailing lists or read the archives.

The meeting rooms should be comfortable and should have enough seating space for people signed up for the remote hub. In case of more than 5-6 people, it is good to have a signup page to estimate einterest, especially if people outside the organsation hosting the remote hub are interested. Please post directions to the venue and rooms well in advance in a meetup group or website so people know about the remote hub.

A good internet connection (> 2Mbps) would be useful especially if there is video through meetecho. Please test the connection (for latency and bandwidth requirements) based on the meetecho link provided on the agenda page. if there are more than 3-4 people, you might also want to have a projectors and a microphone attached to the computer used to relay the discussion so people can participate in the WG. Also test the connection with the meetecho person in the WG room just before the WG meeting commences by giving them enough notice.

The IETF provides a wiki for every physical meeting of the IETF. There is a wiki link on that page that notes the remote hubs available for people to join in. This is not meant to be exhaustive but is indicate of the various remote hubs in various regiosn for specific WGs.

Currently there is no mailing list for remote hubs. It is generally a good idea to announce the remote hub on the WG mailing list so other people from the region who are interested can join in. It is alsoa good idea to let the WG chair know about the remote hub partcipating in the WG.

There can potentially be regular recurring hosts for certain WGs and regions.

There are no IANA considerations.

There are no security considerations.