The NOTIFY BOF at IETF-42.

I Find Karma (adam@cs.caltech.edu)
Wed, 26 Aug 1998 17:54:18 -0700


(posting from Chicago) Yesterday we had the NOTIFY BOF at IETF-42, and
there is an opportunity available to us. Over 100 people attended the
BOF, and around 30 suggested they would be interested in working on this
effort. (Perhaps Jim Whitehead will post the BOF summary to the
notification list...)

We must, however, begin to have discussions regarding our scope, because
we must have a clear charter if we are to work on a standard for
notifications. At lunch some of the NOTIFY people had a discussion with
some of the PIP people

http://lists.fsck.com/cgi-bin/wilma/pip

where we had a consensus about the following:
1. Since PIP is further along than NOTIFY, PIP will continue to work
on passing lightweight, personal presence information updates.
2. PIP will keep an eye on what's being done on NOTIFY over the next
few months, and seriously consider layering atop NOTIFY if appropriate
(this will be reflected perhaps in the PIP charter).

I have just added some materials to

http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/isen/

namely my NOTIFY BOF slides on scenarios

http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/isen/scenarios-etc/

based on the event notification scenarios document Rohit and I wrote

http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/isen/draft-khare-notify-scenarios-01.txt

and Rohit's NOTIFY BOF slides on charter bashing

http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/isen/bof-charter-bash/

based on our efforts to draft a NOTIFY charter

http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/isen/drafts/notify-charter.txt

and our efforts to draft a PAGER charter

http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~adam/isen/drafts/pager-charter.txt

(in fact, I will send the PAGER charter to this list in my next email in
case people want to comment on it).

The main thing we have to do is limit our scope. What are we trying to
accomplish? Do we want to work on a protocol for describing
notifications, a protocol for distributing notifications, and/or a
protocol for (un)subscriptions? What are the benefits of such
notification protocols, and for what applications (specifically) will
they be applied? As a start, we know that some members of the IMAP
community and some members of the Web community would like
notifications (including the DAV and IPP folks, and possibly the
presence folks). Should we focus on "Web events"?

I anticipate we'll discuss these things on the notification list in the
next few months.

----
adam@cs.caltech.edu

In anything at all [especially design], perfection is achieved not when
there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to
take away.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery, "The Little Prince"