Re: Laugh Test: xcon BOF

[Mark Handley <mjh@icir.org>]

>BOF NAME & ACRONYM: Centralized Conferencing (xcon)

...

>The deliverables for the group will be:
>- A mechanism for membership and authorization control
>- A mechanism to manipulate and describe media "layout" or "topology" for 
>multiple media types (audio, video, text)
>- A mechanism for notification of conference related events/changes (for 
>example a roster)
>- A basic floor control protocol
>- Peer-to-peer cascading of conferences (one conference is a participant in 
>another and vice versa)
>
>The following items are specifically out-of-scope:
>- Voting
>- Multicast media (due to security concerns)
>- Fully distributed conferences
>- Loosely-coupled conferences (no central point of control)
>- Far-end device control
>- Protocol used between the conference controller and the mixer(s)
>- Capabilities negotiation of the mixer(s)
>- Master-slave cascaded conferences


I have no problem with narrowly defining the focus of such a proposed
WG, but this seems to go a little too far.  In particular, I don't see
any reason to prohibit the use of multicast for media distribution.

What they need to do is not get held up on hard problems that are
peripheral to their focus.  So, if some of their deliverables can work
just fine with multicast media, and some can't, that's OK.  If there's
a demand, then someone can come along later and solve the remaining
issues related to mulicast.  But ruling it completely out of scope
will ensure that it isn't even considered, even if there's no reason
not to support it for a particular deliverable.

Multicast isn't the only issue here.  Ruling peer-to-peer cascading
in-scope and master-slave cascading out-of-scope seems very arbitrary.

Mechanisms for floor control and mechanisms for voting may be quite
similar.  It seems like something slightly more general may solve both
these two problems and other unforeseen problems, whereas narrowly
defining the scope prevents such solutions being discussed.

In general though, I think this should be a good BOF and likely WG.
Just don't push quite so hard on the narrowness of scope.

Cheers,
	Mark