The Director's Message

The 41st meeting of the IETF was held in Los Angeles, California from March 30 - April 3, 1998. This meeting was well attended with 1,765 registered attendees, about 200 less than the number at the Washington DC meeting. Still, this is the third highest attendance in our meeting history.

A significant milestone was achieved at the 41st meeting, albeit relatively unnoticed (which means it was successful!). This meeting marked the first time the terminal room function was contracted out. Traditionally, IETF meetings have depended upon and benefited from the efforts of local "hosts" who assumed responsibility for setting up, configuring, and supporting the terminal room, but it is not always possible to find a host organization willing to take on the effort. The ability to provide a terminal room facility without depending 100% on the generosity of potential hosts permits the Secretariat to look further into the future when making arrangements for future IETF meetings.

Registration Lines: Where Were They?

Another first for the IETF was the lack of long registration lines. Continuing our efforts to improve the on-site registration process, the Secretariat made arrangements to increase the number of registration stations as well as the number of people staffing the area. This produced a significant number of positive comments, including a number of people who thought they were in the wrong place!

Plenary Presentations

Steve Deering and Radia Perlman reported on the IAB's Routing and Addressing Workshop held in Santa Clara the week before the IETF meeting. The objectives of the workshop was to stimulate interaction among the various communities working on Internet routing and addressing issues, to identify current and future problems, and to identify the means of understanding and solving those problems. The report of the workshop will eventually be published as an RFC, but one can obtain a peek by accessing the overheads slides in the Plenary Section of these proceedings.

Bob Braden made a presentation on the Internet Research Task Force's End-to-End Research Group. Bob began with an informative set of slides that reviewed the history of the IRTF and the End-to-End group itself, transitioning into what is currently underway within the group. Be sure to review his presentation slides (in case there's a quiz later).

Fred Baker, IETF Chair, reviewed the current status of the IETF Secretariat, announcing that it no longer receives funds from National Science Foundation (NSF) and reviewing the changes and accomplishments of the past year. He then showed a number of slides reviewing historic IETF Meeting attendance figures, and disclosed consumption figures (116 Gallons of coffee EACH day!). Fred then introduced Mike St. Johns, chair of this year's Nominations Committee, who reported on this year's efforts.

New IESG and IAB Members

As this was the first IETF meeting of the year, the terms of some Area Directors and IAB members concluded. The IETF/IAB Nominations Committee, working almost non-stop the prior three months, announced the new slate of IESG and IAB members who assumed their duties during the Friday IESG Open Plenary session.

The current members of the IESG are:

Fred Baker

IETF Chair

Harald Alvestrand

Operations & Management

Scott Bradner

Transport

Jeff Burgan

Internet

Rob Coltun

Routing

Patrik Faltstrom *

Applications

Marcus Leech

Security

April Marine

User Services

Keith Moore

Applications

Thomas Narten

Internet

Vern Paxson

Transport

Jeff Schiller

Security

Bert Wijnen

Operations and Management

*Note: Patrik was not announced during the plenary session as he did not become the co-director of the Applications Area after the LA IETF meeting.

The current members of the IAB are:

Brian Carpenter - Chair
Steve Bellovin
Jon Crowcroft
Steve Deering
Ned Freed
Tony Hain
Tim Howes
Erik Huizer
Cindi Jung
John Klensin
Bob Moskowitz
Charlie Perkins

With Gratitude and Appreciation

I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge and thank John Curran, Joel Halpern, Mike O'Dell, Joyce K. Reynolds, and Allyn Romanow for their service to the IETF community as members of the IESG. Thanks and appreciation also go to Robert Elz and Radia Perlman for their service to the community as members of the IAB.

Acknowledgments

Regardless of whether there is a local host or not, the configuration of the terminal room facilities depends a great deal on the generosity of equipment vendors and service providers, and I want to thank the following organizations for their contributions and assistance:

GTE Networking, Internet Access
Cisco Systems, Router
Digital Equipment, Wireless modems
The Internet Society, Funding for our stellar Multicast Team

A special thanks to Stephen Wolff and Cisco Systems who actually donated a router TO the IETF. This router will be used to establish links to the Internet at future IETF meetings.

Upcoming Meetings

The IETF will meet in Chicago, Illinois on August 24-28, 1998. Motorola will host this meeting. Microsoft will host the final 1998 meeting in Orlando, Florida from December 8-12, 1998.

Arrangements for the first meeting of 1999 are still in progress, but the Summer is scheduled for July 12-16 in Oslo, Norway. For the final meeting of 1999, the IETF will return to the Omni Hotel in Washington, DC.

Don't forget: the first meeting of 2000 will be in Adelaide, Australia. The rest of the meetings are still in the planning stages. For information about future meetings, visit the IETF Web Page. Our URL is
http://www.ietf.org

Steve <scoya@ietf.org>