Session Date/Time: 23 Jul 2023 19:30

Tutorial: New Participants' Overview

Summary

This tutorial provides an overview of the IETF for new participants, covering meeting management, IETF structure, consensus building, contributing to working groups, and available resources. It also outlines activities specifically designed for new participants during the week.

Key Discussion Points

Note Well: Emphasized the importance of understanding the IETF's policies and procedures, especially regarding intellectual property, photography, privacy, and anti-harassment.
Meet Echo: Explained the use of Meet Echo for tracking attendance and managing the queue for asking questions.
Lanyards, Pins, and Buttons: Described the use of colored lanyards (green and red) to indicate comfort level with being photographed, pins to indicate comfort level with physical contact, and language buttons to indicate language fluency.
IETF Mission and Ethos: Explained the IETF's mission to make the Internet work better through open standards, emphasizing open participation, free access to work products (via datatracker.ietf.org), technical merit, and voluntary deployment.
IETF Structure: Described the IETF organizational structure, including working groups, areas, the IESG, the IRSG, the IAB, the IETF LLC, the RFC Editor, and IANA.
IETF Areas: Detailed the current IETF areas: Applications and Real-Time, Transport, Routing, Internet, Operations and Network Management, Security, and General.
Consensus Building: Explained the IETF's rough consensus model, rejecting formal voting, and using humming to gauge the sentiment of the room.
Contributing to Working Groups: Outlined how to join working groups (via mailing lists), review documents, and contribute through mailing lists, meetings, and GitHub.
Introducing New Work: Discussed the process for introducing new work, including identifying a problem, finding collaborators, aligning with IETF principles, and having willing contributors.
Funding Model: Briefly touched upon the IETF's funding model, which includes registration fees, donations, and corporate sponsorships.
Upcoming Week Overview: Provided information about the week's events, including working group sessions, Birds of a Feather sessions, IRTF sessions, a joint session with ACM (ANRW), area-wide meetings, a plenary, social event, and tutorials.
Draft Expiration: A question was raised about how and when Internet Drafts expire, which lead to a discussion of the expiration process, how the contributors of the draft keep it alive. Also the presenters clarified the status of Internet drafts to RFCs.
New Participant Activities: Highlighted activities specifically for new participants, including Quick Connections, a new participant dinner, and a new participant social hour.
Available Resources: Described the availability of the RFC Editor staff, IANA staff, Ombudsman's team, and a network operations center (NOC) for assistance.

Decisions and Action Items

New participants were encouraged to sign up for the new participant dinner and social hour.
New participants were directed to resources, IETF Datatracker, to look at all the Internet Drafts, what's happening in the working groups and meeting.
New participants were encouraged to look into the various activities happening this week and review the schedule for agenda changes.

Next Steps

New participants should familiarize themselves with the IETF Datatracker and Meet Echo.
New participants should identify working groups of interest and join their mailing lists.
New participants should review the week's agenda and plan their session attendance.