Presence and IntComm WG

["Ben Chinowsky" <>]

*Action Items as of August 23*

(high priority)
[ACTION] (8/17) Peter will ask Sean Egan for an update on Jingle in Gaim.
[ACTION] (8/3) Rodger will launch an email discussion of if and how to fix 
pals
and pals-dev.
[ACTION] (8/3) Rodger will recruit Peter to provide an update on recent
developments in the Jabber community, in particular developments at OSCON.
[ACTION] (8/3) Rodger will send out pointers to an assortment of XMPP-client
feature-comparison matrices, highlighting items of particular interest or
concern to the group.
[ACTION] (8/3) Rodger will revise his Gaim setup instructions.
[ACTION] (5/18) Ben T. will post the calendar-integration code (written by his
2005 SoC student) on the Penn XMPP server; Mark will evaluate prospects for
modifying it to drive XMPP presence.

(medium priority)
[ACTION] (8/3) Joe will update the group on work in IETF SIMPLE, after he
talks to Jon Peterson at VON.
[ACTION] (8/3) Rodger will put a discussion of current vendor offerings in the
location-services space on the agenda for a future call.
[ACTION] (5/11 - on hold for the summer) Ben T. will look for students active
in Place Lab to work with PIC.
[ACTION] (pre-12/8 - in progress) Rodger and Joe will write up some use cases
for enterprise federations.

*Attendees*

Rodger Will (chair) - Ford
Joe Rork - Ford
Peter Saint-Andre - Jabber Software Foundation
Dennis Baron - MIT
Neal McBurnett - Internet2
Ben Teitelbaum - Internet2
Ben Chinowsky (scribe) - Internet2

*Discussion*

The group discussed possibilities for creating a standard interface for 
presence
information. Approaches suggested included XML, cross-platform APIs, and 
server
plugins that function as XMPP clients. Peter noted that plazes
(http://beta.plazes.com/) lets you publish  geolocation information, but as 
far
as he knows there is no API. Peter suggested that the key question here is not
technical but social: is there enough social-networking interest to drive
creation of a standard presence interface? How many people are interested in
communications along the lines of "you're listening to the same tune or 
playing
the same game I am -- let's chat about it"? Social networking on the basis of
what you're watching on TV or what websites you visit, are among the other
possibilities.

Peter gave a Jingle update. The developers are currently working through 
issues
with how to handle multiple content types in a session. Peter has gotten some
feedback from Asterisk and Freeswitch on the need to accomodate their products
in signaling. The Jingle group is also working on using ICE
(http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-mmusic-ice-09.txt), which
defines standard ways to do NAT traversal using existing IETF standards. Peter
noted that lots of people have coded to the existing Jingle spec, and will be
updating their code once the updated spec is out, sometime in the next couple
of months. Although there are no official numbers on Google Talk usage, Peter
thinks the New York Times report claiming that there are few users was
"very far off". [ACTION] Peter will ask Sean Egan for an update on Jingle
in Gaim.

Rodger summed up PIC's current XMPP project as: get Mark's presence-agent
code working, use it for some compelling demonstrations, and put together
cookbooks that would explain how to deploy the presence agent for various
use cases.