VCON

Summary

The VCON working group held an interim virtual meeting to discuss updates to draft-ietf-vcon-vcon-core, resolve open data modeling issues, review CDDL extension points, and refine proposed rechartering language regarding AI agents and transactional records.

Key Discussion Points

Core Specification Updates (draft-ietf-vcon-vcon-core)

Daniel Petrie presented document updates and open technical issues using the slide deck vCon core Petrie:

Contributors vs. Receivers: Clarified party roles across the specification. Contributors are listed in the dialogue party list, while receivers are listed in the session. For email mappings, the From address maps to dialogue parties, whereas To, Cc, and Bcc map to the session.
Text Dialogues: Clarified that a text dialogue represents a single message from a contributor.
JSON Schema: Fixed schema errors from prior iterations.

Technical Discussion and Open Issues

Session Boundaries vs. Dialogue Timeframes: Discussed whether a session's start time and duration must strictly encompass all referenced dialogues. Jonathan Rosenberg noted that relaxing this constraint supports use cases like tap/SIPREC recording where sessions reference sub-segments of longer dialogues. Daniel Petrie agreed to update draft-ietf-vcon-vcon-core accordingly.
CDDL and Extension Points: Henk Birkholz and Daniel Petrie discussed CDDL socket extensions. They agreed to validate CDDL structures and socket extension points against sample corpora during the upcoming IETF hackathon.
Event Inheritance Across Sessions: Discussed event inheritance between parent and child sessions. To avoid conflicts when parent and child sessions have differing participant sets, Daniel Petrie proposed allowing event references to specify an array of session IDs rather than enforcing mandatory inheritance or event duplication. Jonathan Rosenberg supported this approach.
IANA Registries: Discussed whether IANA registries are necessary for disposition and encoding values. Jonathan Rosenberg expressed concern about creating too many small registries and suggested considering a consolidated multi-level naming structure.
Multi-channel Recording Party Change Event: Daniel Petrie presented a use case where a multi-channel recording dynamically assigns active speakers across channels over time. He proposed a new dialogue-level event type to signal contributor changes on a specific recording channel (dialog, channel_index, timestamp, and updated party list). Jonathan Rosenberg and Thomas McCarthy-Howe supported the proposal, noting that session references are unnecessary for dialogue-specific events.

Rechartering and Working Group Scope

Charter PR Review: The group reviewed Pull Request #41 (shared in chat by Daniel Petrie) submitted by Francesco Moretto, which proposed adding charter text regarding user instructions, approvals, and references to transactional records (e.g., orders or payments) resulting from agentic conversations.
Scope Boundary: Jonathan Rosenberg, Thomas McCarthy-Howe, Chris Wendt, and Daniel Petrie noted that while vCons must be able to reference external approval or transaction objects defined elsewhere (such as in Audit or Agent Proto working groups), defining approval object formats is out of scope for VCON.
AI Extensions Structure: Daniel Petrie proposed updating the charter to explicitly mention "one or more extensions" for AI agent interactions rather than a single monolithic document, enabling modular extension drafts (e.g., chain of thought).

Decisions and Action Items

Decisions

Session Boundaries: Relax the requirement in draft-ietf-vcon-vcon-core that session start time and duration must strictly encompass dialogue timeframes.
Event References: Allow event objects to reference an array of session IDs to handle multi-session applicability cleanly without enforcing parent-child inheritance.
New Dialogue Event: Add a dialogue-level event type to signal contributor changes on specific channels in multi-channel recordings.
Charter Language:
- Accept the part of PR #41 referencing external transaction records (orders/payments) resulting from conversations, while removing text that would put defining human approval object formats in scope for VCON.
- Specify "one or more extensions" for AI agent interactions in the recharter text.

Action Items

Jonathan Rosenberg: Send a PR to Daniel Petrie adding redaction tagging to draft-ietf-vcon-vcon-core.
Daniel Petrie: Merge PR #41 and create a follow-up PR adjusting the charter text according to the agreed boundaries and extension wording.
Chris Wendt: Socialize the proposed recharter text across related mailing lists (Agent Proto, Audit, DON) prior to IETF to inform community members of VCON's AI agent work.
Henk Birkholz & Daniel Petrie: Coordinate via Signal/email to review CDDL socket extension points and test them against sample corpora ahead of the IETF hackathon.

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