1.1 The Director's Message

The 45th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force was held in Oslo, Norway from July 11-16, 1999. Our local host was UNINETT, assisted by a number of different organizations. Ericsson was the host for the social event.

As many IETFers know, there typically is a drop in the number of attendees when we meet in Europe. The Oslo meeting actually had 5 more attendees than the level reached at the previous meeting in Minneapolis! There were 400 more attendees at the Oslo meeting as in the previous European meeting (Munich, July 1997). The split between non-US and US attendees was about even, which is typical for non-North American meetings.

Plenary Sessions

The plenary session seemed to have a theme of cooperation and coexistance. Dr. Houlin Zhao, Director, Telecommunication Standardization Bureau, ITU-T spoke on the subject of interaction and interoperation between the ITU and the IETF. His presentation included an overview of the organization and structure of the ITU-T, its history, and a summary of its collaboration efforts. Dr. Zhao then went on to link the various ITU efforts and structure with those of the IETF. Dr. Zhao's slides are included in the Plenary section of these proceedings.

Following Dr. Zhao's presentation, Fred Baker, IETF Chair, was joined by Michael Roberts, Interim President and CEO of ICANN, Dr. Zhao of the ITU, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen of the World Wide Web Consortium, and Bridget Cosgrave of ETSI to sign a Memorandum of Understanding creating the Protocol Support Organization (PSO) within the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

For more detailed information on the PSO, see the ICANN-PSO presentation slides in the Poisson minutes of these proceedings.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank UNINETT and their team of sponsors for hosting the 45th meeting of the IETF, for providing access to the Internet, and for providing the terminal room facilities that included the best view in IETF history!

Ingred Melve of UNINETT did a superb job arranging and coordinating all of the networking and terminal room efforts, and we all appreciated the efforts of her father-in-law who "borrowed" some video projectors in Trondheim for us to use in Oslo. I would also like to recognize the efforts of Olaf Schjelderup of UNINETT and his team who handled all the networking ("and other technical stuff") efforts, and Thomas Malt for handling all of the multicast aspects.

Our deep appreciation goes out to Petter Kongshaug, UNINETT's director, who not only approved the whole thing, and let UNINETT spend an incredible amount of its manpower on it, but did a significant amount of the fundraising.

Of course, our thanks go out to Harald Alvestrand of EDB Maxware who was instrumental in bringing the IETF to Oslo. And, once again, to the folks at Ericsson for arranging and sponsoring the Social Event.

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:

Evercom

PCs

Stimo AS

PCs

Breezecom

Wireless LAN

Mandata

Wireless LAN

Upgrade

Wireless LAN

Symbol

Wireless LAN

Telnor

Backup line

Alcatel

About 5 km of cables

Intel

Hubs

HP

Printers

Cisco

Routers and Financial support

Microsoft

Software licenses and Financial support

Sun

Financial support

Novell

Financial support

_stfold College

Multicast support

University of Oslo

Lots of their net people worked.

Ping

Olso Computer club

Inktomi

Financial support

Upcoming Meetings

For the final meeting of 1999, the IETF will return to the Omni Hotel in Washington, DC.

The first meeting of 2000 will be in Adelaide, Australia. The Secretariat is in the final planning stages for the remaining two meetings of the year, and we expect to be able to identify the cities in the next few months. Future meetings are 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>