Meeting with several network engineers across the world who are facing and solving similar problems is the main benefit that technologists from developing countries are receiving as a result of the Internet Society's fellowship program. Without this fellowship I wasn’t able to present my ideas and relevant issues at IETF to get the necessary inputs from the IETF community.
The IETF Fellowship program increases the diversity of inputs and global awareness of, the IETF’s work. Since its inception, this program has connected increasingly more new Fellows with mentors and other members with similar interests within the IETF community. Although Fellows represent a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, they share a commitment to the betterment of their constituency and a passion for the collaborative process that defines the IETF.
I believe,IETF established through its marvellous work in the Open internet standard, making process that The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is among the world’s premier Internet standards-setting organizations and I have realized it ,beyond doubt, during my IETF 97 Fellowship week, sponsored by ISOC and APNIC.
I would like to take this opportunity to describe my experience of IETF 97 and work during the whole week in the beautiful city of Seoul.
I am an Internet Governance and Information Security professional working on both policy and technology issues related to the Internet, including but not limited to unique Internet identifiers (domain names, IP addresses, AS numbers, protocol parameters) and Internet technology / protocols / standards. In order to complete a 360 degree picture of the Internet Governance space, I continually strive to attend various meetings / events of core Internet organizations / forums like ICANN, ISOC, IETF, IGF, APNIC, SANOG.
I have received the prestigious ISOC Fellowship award to attend the IETF 97, Seoul, South Korea as First Time fellow.The whole experience is really useful for me as it has given me a great opportunity to contribute to IETF activities directly in the form of my two sessions as an ISOC fellow, namely;
1- DNSBUNDLED BoF
The DNSBUNDLED BoF session is all about a DNS solution for fully mapping one domain name to another domain name. With the emergence of internationalized domain names and new TLDs, it is often useful to redirect one domain name tree fully to another domain name tree. Current DNS protocols have not provided such ability to satisfy these requirements.
Mr. John Levine has described the Problem Statement,followed by the Case studies of .CN & .GR, .TW cases, .CZ cases,.IN cases, Registrar cases by Mr. Jiankang Yao,
Mr. Naiwen Hsu, Mr. Ondřej Surý,Mr. Harish Chowdhary and Richard Merdinger
Respectively.
Most interesting part of the session was Open discussion on the topic.There was a gathering of around 125+ participants.
Mr. Paul Hoffman
Andrew Sullivan (IAB)
Jiankang YAO
And several other engineers provided comments and suggestions on the presentation.
This gives entire 360 degree view on How IETF works and how new working groups created.
2- Deployment Issues of Internationalized E-mails – Bar BoF
(However, there was no bar, we have done it on 8AM, Thrusday, 17th Nov 2016) in the presence of the stalwarts of the IETF and ISOC namely (Included but not limited to)
Mr. John C. Klensen
Mr. Paul Hoffman,
Mr.Dan York, (ISOC)
Mr. Olof Kolkman (ISOC)
Mr. James Galvin (Afilias)
Mr. Jian Kang Yao (CNNIC)
In addition to that ,following officials were also present representing the Governments of Thailand and India
Mr. Wanawit Ahkuputra (Govt of Thailand)
Mr. T Santhost (Govt of INDIA)
Many invited first time IETF fellows, were also present.
Issues discussed in above session was based upon the following abstract
International Email Addresses (IEA) are far from the global reality. The current de-facto language of the Internet is English. Even today, many of the users of the Internet do not speak English as their primary language. The next billion users of the Internet are likely to be even less familiar with English. IEA is probably the first application needed in a truly internationalized Internet. The Email Address Internationalization (EAI) Working Group defined the RFCs to support internationalized email. The time may now finally have come to develop best practices and to discuss the deployment challenges for IEA.
IETF community taken this initiative very positively as it is also directly dealing to solve the issues related to Universal Acceptance and Multilingual Internet.
IETF has given me the best opportunity to meet the technical community in person and exchange views and it is really wonderful experience of face-to-face meetings with the counterparts across the globe. This helped me to resolve the technical issues and gave me a clear direction to proceed with my work on EAI.”
In addition to that I have learned about the hierarchy of the IETF and how the standards body works. “I gave a talk to my fellow mates in NIXI related to this.
Further, Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) and “I” in IoT Session were really wonderful.
ISOC Fellows to the IETF are paired with mentors who share their interests. Mentors help Fellows in the understanding of the meeting process, introduce them to other members, and answer questions as and when required. To benefit from the meetings you must be able to follow them. I find it best not to attend every session on every topic that interests me. I pick one and master the art of how the meeting runs, and then read the archives after that, thanks to MEETECHO.
Participating in the IETF’s work to make the Internet work better through an open process feels great. It’s going to change a few things in my life and I’m totally happy about it.
Last, but not the least, I would like to thank my organization National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI), encouraging and supporting me to work in the area of Open Internet Standard making Process ,specially CEO,NIXI and my reporting managers.I would also like to thank IETF Mentoring Project Head – Ms. Nalini Elkins for guiding me throughout the IETF journey from IETF 94.
Finally, it's an honour to be an ISOC fellow.
If you like this blog, or have any queries please get in touch with me at harish@nixi.in,