1.1 Director's Message

WOW!

That word best describes the 51st meeting of the IETF held in London, England, from August 6-10, 2001.

WOW! Over 2100 attended the summer meeting Europe. Remember when we had an attendance drop when meeting outside of North America? This non-US meeting ranks fifth in terms of meeting attendees. This was in spite of all the dire predictions attendance would be lower than normal due to the state of the economy (and HMD).

WOW! The weather was excellent all week long (are we sure we were in England?)!

WOW! The wireless network was up and running on FRIDAY, DNS services coming up stably the next day. Good thing too since we discovered London tends to close up about 11PM.

WOW! RFC1149 has been implemented.

Plenary Presentations

Following Harald's opening remarks, Chris Earnshaw, Group Engineering Director and Chief Technology officer for the BT group, shared his impressions and perspective of the future to the plenary audience. He was followed by Gary Shainberg who described the network supporting the 51st IETF, and then showed one of the early Apple commercials, pointing out that the dream being described then was the same dream being realized today.

While the IETF was in London, the U.S. was hit by the Code Red Virus (gee, leave you folks for a couple of days, and look what happens). Steve Bellovin addressed the plenary bringing everyone up to date (eliminating a lot of rumors as well) and even provided IP addresses of devices in the terminal room/wireless network that were infected!

Steve Deering gave a highly interesting (and entertaining!) presentation titled "Watching the Waist of the Protocol Hourglass." His slides are included in these proceedings, and I encourage everyone to read them AND think about them.

Harald made a special presentation to the team that was the first to implement RFC1149. You can learn more about this special event by visiting http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/minutes1.html.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank BT Exact for their outstanding performance hosting the terminal room, building the network infrastructure, and for arranging the social event. I would like to specifically mention (and reiterate my thanks) to Tony Spall, Gary Shainberg, Mike Keeble, and Franco Badini for all their efforts in putting it together. And a special thanks goes out to Gary Jones for his dedication to the event, and for continuing to push for excellence, and to Liz Hobson who started the effort.

And, of course, a very special thanks to Keith Dickerson, Group Standards Manager of BT whose budget provided the funding.

A special thanks goes to Jon Crowcroft for providing the volunteers to support the multicast team... and for providing his Guide to London.

Upcoming Meetings

The final meeting of 2001 will be held in Salt Lake City, preceding the Winter Olympics. For the first meeting of 2002, motivated by the many favorable comments received, we are returning to Minneapolis. Yes, the same hotel. NO, they are not taking reservations!!!

For information about future meetings or the IETF, visit our web page at http://www.ietf.org/

Steve <scoya@ietf.org>