[Ecn-sane] travel funds for ietf for the next SCE talk?

[Dave Taht]

On Mon, Apr 29, 2019 at 5:32 PM Magnus Westerlund
<magnus.westerlund at ericsson.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Dave,
>
> Thanks for bring this work to the IETF. Yes, I would also like to encourage you to discuss your proposal in TSVWG using the mailing list and eventually present this work at the next TSVWG meeting. However, there is not required to participate in-person. We frequently have remote presentations and from my experience that works well. I’m sure the TSVWG chairs can further advise you on this.

This is one of those replies that I had to sit on for a while because
it was so mind-boggling.

If you haven't noticed a few hundred messages about reforming the ietf
on the IETF mailing list to allow remote participants to have *a vote*
in how the ietf operates, you might want to review those.

A remote presentation is not enough to get a vote in how the ietf operates.

Remote participation on the mailing lists, in this case, was certainly
not enough. Externally it looked like the l4s/dualpi/tcpprague effort
was spiraling down the drain with a pesky FRAND patent, no integrated,
running code, and 4 as-yet unresolved theoretical problems weighing it
down.

But... it really did feel like matters were being settled in smoky
back rooms when this set of drafts, pitched to the IETF as a (rather
dubious) experiment, when it came out (hours after we submitted our
SCE draft) that cablelabs had announced their new standard (no doubt
expecting a rubber stamp from the ietf) a few weeks prior, and had,
indeed, been working in secret for 16 months to take over the "last
half bit" of the ECN header for their own use.

Radically enough, I do tend to think that the open source community
does need MUCH better *representation* within the ietf, and to
leverage Thomas Paine's writings, there should be "no standardization
without representation", particularly in cases where the code has to
be universally deployed. This requires actual IETF attendance, by the
coders or their representatives, at least presently.

Unlike all the other conferences we attend, speakers are not
recompensed for their costs in the IETF, either.

I still doubt that our new competing, backwards compatible alternate
proposal, will get any pull in various smoky backrooms, but being
there in person, giving a preso, and wandering the hallways still
seems to help. Especially... when the ideas and their implications are
so difficult to express to people outside the narrow field of
congestion control in the first place, and don't fit easily into an
RFC format without useful code, repeatable benchmarks, public
experiments and graphs as guides.

> Cheers
>
> Magnus Westerlund
>
>
>
> On 2019-04-28 15:54, Dave Taht wrote:
> > Several members of the open source "bufferbloat.net" group do
> > regularly participate in ietf mailing lists and remote meetings, but
> > it is rare that any of us
> > can actually afford to attend IETF. In fact, we've had no travel
> > budget for 3 years running. I'd mostly reduced my involvement to BABEL
> > after the AQM wg closed, and that remotely only.
> >
> > This past IETF, we had to hold a bake sale on the bloat mailing list
> > as well as melt all my credit cards in order to get our new SCE "Some
> > Congestion Experienced" AQM concept in front of the tsvwg and iccrg
> > working groups in contrast to the cablelabs dualpi proposal.
> >
> > (if anyone cares, the TSVWG talk and slides are here:
> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQmWyr0JDJM&t=1h3m50s ) -
> >
> > The controversy in the open source community, covered here:
> > https://lwn.net/Articles/783673/
> >
> > We've been *very strongly encouraged* to present again at the upcoming
> > ietf in montreal, but I'm now in no position to sponsor the 2-3 core
> > people again that need to present the follow-on results in the 5 or so
> > related wgs. Is there an org, a fund, a means, a way, to get a bunch
> > of rather poor, but innovative, open source devs and theorist, out
> > there, that we can apply to? raise the ~9k needed? isoc? Something?
> >
> > (and if it were possible i'd rather like to have what I had had to
> > spend back, so I can pour it into recreating a network testbed for
> > this work. I'm not planning to attend, myself. The one trip alone
> > wiped out ecn-sane's budget for the year)
> >
>
> --
>
> Magnus Westerlund
>
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-- 

Dave Täht
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