1.1 The Director's Message

The 44th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force was held in Minneapolis, Minnesota from March 15-19, 1999. Attendence at this meeting slipped back below the 2000 mark, settling in at 1780 attendees. While attendence was relatively low (a condition for which no one was heard to complain), the international flavor of the IETF was definitely in evidence in Minneapolis.

Until recently, even with spikes in meeting attendance, the percentage of non-US attendees has ranged between 12 and 17 percent. That ratio rose to 22% for the Chicago IETF meeting, and on up to 30% in Orlando. This trend continued with Minneapolis where just under 35% of the attendees were non-US based.

Plenary Presentations

Following Fred's opening comments and conveyance of thanks to those who made the 44th IETF meeting the success that it was, the plenary began with an unscheduled presentation celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the very first RFC. Steve Crocker, who initiated the RFC publication series, gave the presentation. Steve shared a number of memories from the very early days of the Networking Working Group - an entity that later evolved to become the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Harald Alvestrand, our host for the 45th IETF meeting, followed with a slide show on Norway (go to Europe, take a left)! Scott Bradner then presented a short and concise descriptive overview of the ICANN/PSO status.

Brian Carpenter, Chair of the IAB, presented his paper Transparency of the Network Layer, based on the Internet-Draft draft-carpenter-transparency-nn. Brian's slides, along with the others, are included in these proceedings.

Don Eastlake, this year's Nominations Committee chair, then presented the results of the committee's efforts.

New IESG and IAB members

As this was the first IETF meeting of the year, the terms of some Area Directors and IAB members concluded. The IETF/IAB Nominations Committee, working almost non-stop the prior three months, announced the new slate of IESG and IAB members who assumed their duties following the Wednesday evening IESG Open Plenary session.

The current members of the IESG are:

Fred Baker

IETF Chair

Scott Bradner

Transport

Randy Bush

Operations and Management

Rob Coltun

Routing

Patrik Faltstrom

Applications

Marcus Leech

Security

April Marine

User Services

Keith Moore

Applications

Thomas Narten

Internet

Erik Nordmark

Internet

David Oran

Routing

Vern Paxson

Transport

Jeff Schiller

Security

Bert Wijnen

Operations and Management

The current members of the IAB are:

- Brian Carpenter - Chair

- Harald Alvestrand

- Ran Atkinson

- Rob Austein

- Steve Bellovin

- Jon Crowcroft

- Steve Deering

- Ned Freed

- Tony Hain

- Tim Howes

- Geoff Huston

- John Klensin

With gratitude and appreciation

I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge and thank Harald Alvestrand and Jeff Burgan for their service to the IETF community as members of the IESG. Thanks and appreciation also go to Erik Huizer, Cindi Jung, Bob Moskowitz, and Charlie Perkins for their service to the community as members of the IAB.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Ascend for hosting the 44th meeting of the IETF, for providing the terminal room facilities, and arranging the social event at Snoopy's. Matt Holdrege of Ascent and Dennis Fazio of MRNET did a superb job arranging and coordinating the efforts of everyone who helped with the terminal room. And a special thanks to Mary Clouter of Compaq for once again donating her time throughout the week, but especially during the initial setup and configuration of the terminal room.

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:

Compaq

PCs and Wireless

Cisco Systems

Ethernet Switches

Hewlett Packard

Printers

MRNet

ISP services

Real Networks

Unicast Services

A special thanks goes out to Virginia Thomas of RealNetworks who once again came to the IETF meeting and transmitted audio-video signals so sessions could be viewed via the web. Special acknowledgments are also due to Evi Nemeth and Kevin Almeroth (and those hungry grad students) for handling all aspects of the multicast effort.

Upcoming Meetings

The IETF travels to Oslo, Norway for the 45th IETF meeting. This meeting, scheduled for July 12-16, is being hosted by UNINET. For the last meeting of the year, the IETF will meet in Washington, DC on November 8-12, 1999. Nortel has graciously offered to host this meeting.

The first meeting of 2000 will be in Adelaide, Australia. 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>