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Dan York: I'm here with Jari Arkko, the chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force
and we're finishing up the 87th meeting of the IETF here in Berlin, Germany
What are some of the areas of work this week you found most interesting?
Jari Arkko: Well, I found most interesting piece of work to be
the new proposals, we had exceptionally many suggestions for new working groups
this time: 12.
Some of those were in the area of home networking,
Internet of things, and better queue management for routers
-- without increasing the speed
of your links to the Internet, make the Internet quality better, make your browser work faster
Dan: Can you give us a sense--
it seems like a lot of people were here. Can you give a sense of how many people
are what countries, what kind geographic coverage there was?
Jari: This is a record meeting in many ways. We have for over 1400 people here
which is more than we've had in many, many years.
But perhaps more importantly we had 62 countries
when I checked yesterday and maybe a few more today,
which is a huge number of people from different places.
It is important to understand how the Internet works in different places.
and what requirements people have, so that's really great.
And, over three hundred newcomers--that's also amazing.
So we have lots of new people coming to the IETF.
Dan: That's great. How how do we channel that energy of all those
newcomers and those people coming in there? I know you can involved with mentoring.
You've helped start up some initiatives of things.
Can you talk a bit about some of that?
Jari: Right, so it is indeed a challenge
to get new people set up for work at the IETF,
to make sure they have the connections,
and they find ways to do productive work here.
For these reasons may be trying to make sure that we can welcome
all kinds of people from all areas of the world.
And we have our mentoring programs
to team up newcomers with people have been here longer and
seems to be working pretty well so I'm really happy about this.
It is an IETF community effort
so lots of people volunteered to do this.
Dan: I've heard some great comments this week from people who are new mentors
and just talk about how it's enriched their experience here.
Now you also involved with setting up a diversity task force, or design team.
What's involved with that?
Jari: Well, the main goal that we
really can use all the experiences all of people
that want to have an effect on the Internet--
from different areas of the world,
different types of organizations, like vendors,
or operators, or academia.
And we're trying to make that
as easy as possible for everyone
so that we can grow on those experiences. The IETF can say we understand
what the needs for the Internet are, requirements for the Internet, and the problems
people are facing today.
That's the main goal.
Only then we can actually work
in the most efficient manner to build the new Internet technologies that everyone needs.
Dan: Speaking of that,
have there been new areas--you mentioned the BoFs at the beginning--
some of the new areas that have been,
or the new areas that the IETF needs to go into,
that you're seeing coming out the work here?
Jari: Well, some other things that I personally am
following quite a bit. One is putting multimedia technology in the browsers.
Another one is enabling the Internet of things
to put IP technology in objects around us
and the role of the IETF is not to design those applications per se
but create a platform where others-the vendors and innovators
and individual users can build on these technologies
to do all the great things that we've known them to do
for this is the Internet so far and just
up I'm very happy about what's going on.
It seems like we're getting these platforms in place,
and the sky is the limit for the innovations to come on top of those.
Dan: Now this is your first time as IETF Chair.
In full environment here. How's it been?
Jari: Certainly I have far less time to do the technical work.
So that's one aspect of it.
It's also good for me to see how much energy people have
around the organization,
how the newcomers are coming in. It's been a lot of fun actually.
Dan: Speaking of those newcomers:
if you could say one thing the people there about why they should be involved
with the IETF, what would you say?
Why would you encourage people to get involved?
Jari: Well we could talk about the different technical topics,
but I think that's beside the point.
For me, and I hope for most of the people here,
the real answer is that people at the IETF. So if you come here, you'll meet
lots of people who are building the real components
for routers and
computers that do this "Internet thing".
and having an opportunity to talk to those people
and come up with new extensions, or new ideas.
That's really exciting.
It's also business opportunity because
that means we can find others who have an ability to effect what kind of things
are running on the Internet.
And then, together, we can actually make new things.
happen as opposed to attempting to do it alone.
So it's the people, the connections
that's most interesting.
Dan: A final question. Looking ahead for this next while,
where do you see the IETF going over this next bit?
Where do you see the work that's happening here moving?
Jari: I think its mostly in the areas of multimedia communications,
the Internet of things.
Of course,
we need to take care of the network backbone as well.
We have out routing systems, and
everything else of working as efficiently as possible.
Dan: Well thank you for your time Jari. I wish you the best with the rest of the week here.
Jari: My pleasure.