The IETF has not changed its meeting format since I attended IETF 34 in Dallas back in 1995. We have developed much remote presence technology since. Surely we should start using it.
Do we really need to meet in plenary session three times a year? Is the model where IETF meeting time is limited to brief status updates and most of the work is 'taken to the list' optimal ?
Maybe we need to change our existing model or maybe we need to keep it unchanged and supplement it somehow. Remote meeting attendance is better than nothing. But does it really help for me to wake up at 2am to listen to a complex technical talk? Perhaps all meeting at the same time has to be rethought, not just meeting in the same place.
Perhaps what we could do is to move some of the technical content out of the meetings altogether and put it up on the Web. To test this theory and also to promote my efforts to make computers easier to use by making them more secure, I have begun filming a series of videos explaining the Mesh technology. These are currently available through the links below and I will work out some way to distribute the material in a downloadable format (2k/4K) so people can take them for 'in flight entertainment' on that 24 hour flight to Singapore.
The channel is here:
The material itself is currently unlisted but can be accessed directly from the links below.
For the purposes of this experiment, the four videos have very different material:
Mesh 1: The Mesh at 10,000 ft, explains the requirements the project is designed to address without drilling down into the technical details. It is the sort of pitch I give to potential investors / stakeholders.
Mesh 2: The Devil is in the Deployment, is not technical at all. It is explaining just why I think a proposal of this scope it entirely feasible and describes the strategies I copied from Tim Berners-Lee to get it deployed.
Mesh 3: How the Mesh works, is a more technical overview of how the various parts of the Mesh are designed to work together. The sort of thing an IAB plenary tech talk might be. Technical knowledge is assumed but not deep understanding.
Mesh 4: Meta-cryptography for key splitting is a graduate level technical presentation giving material that is not in the cryptography textbooks (yet). The sort of presentation I might give at MIT CSAIL etc.
Given the IETF preference for a minimalist approach to presentation, there are no PowerPoint slides at all.
The remaining videos will be posted as they are completed, these will include technical drill downs on each of the three technologies I am proposing and an explanation of how we can then apply the Mesh to create novel and interesting security solutions for the Web, SSH, OpenPGP, S/MIME etc.
The videos will be going out to the public shortly. They are all Creative Commons with attribution
