ietf-ircup

Last year at the March IETF meeting in Memphis, there was a BOF (Birds Of a Feather - An IETF discussion group) to discuss IRC issues. I presented a draft for MCC (Multicast chat) and Lisa Dusseault of Microsoft presented a draft for IRCX (extensions to IRC). The decision was made that there needed to be more discussion involving the current IRC community before a working group should be formed. So a mailing group (ietf-ircup@xxxxxxx) was formed to handle this discussion. It is now the following year and there has been one message posted (by me) on this group. A BOF was attempted at the December 97 IETF but was refused because of the lack of traffic on the mailing list.

So, my New Years resolution for 1998 is to attempt to jump start the discussion on this mailing list. The person that was responsible for this discussion has been swamped with other standards work. I will take over that responsibility. My initial goal is to break up IRC in to two working groups. The first group would be responsible for attempting to coalesce all the current IRC standards in practice into a single standard. The second group would look at a long term solution by coming up with a next generation protocol that addresses all the fundamental problems of the current one (scalability, security, instability, user identification, etc...). What I want to get accomplished by the next IETF in March (at L.A.) is an agreement in general to create these two working groups and come up with the responsibilities assigned to each and to schedule a BOF at the IETF.