Presence and IntComm WG

["Ben Chinowsky" <>]

*Action Items as of October 25*

[ACTION] (10/10) John Streck will ask Tyler and Christian at UNC to join the 
PIC
conference calls.
[ACTION] (10/4) Peter will find out if Horizon Wimba can interoperate with 
other
XMPP services, in particular whether it can do server-to-server federation.
[ACTION] (7/12) Deke and Mark will prepare a simple demo of pseudonymity in
Jabber chatrooms, for a PIC call this fall.
[ACTION] (7/12) Jonathan will recruit Tom Uram to join a PIC call.

*Notes*

There was a PIC conference call October 4, with Tim, Randy, Neal, Ben, Deke 
and
Peter present on the phone, in the XMPP chatroom 
(),
 or
both. The main discussion took place in the chatroom and concerned 
preparations
for the PIC sessions at the Internet2 Member Meeting. Also:
- Peter noted that a relaunch of www.jabber.org is in the works; among other
things the new site will include more detailed information about clients. See
http://wiki.jabber.org/index.php/Jabber.org_relaunch
- Neal noted that bots are available to help facilitate meetings via IM; see
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ScribesTeam/MootBot and
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBots

Attendees at the October 10 PIC WG meeting in San Diego were:

Tim Callahan (incoming chair) - Michigan
Deke Kassabian (outgoing chair) - Penn
John Streck - North Carolina
Garret Yoshimi - Hawaii
Randy Stout - Kansas Board of Regents
Dave Pokorney - Florida LambdaRail
Liane Tarouco - Rede Nacional De Pesquisa (Brazil)
Rodney McDuff - Queensland (Australia)
Ben Chinowsky (scribe) - Internet2

Discussion:
- Tim took over the WG chair from Deke.
- Tim noted that the problem of lack of common IM tools was discussed at the
collaboration SIG meeting in San Diego. He suggested that group would make 
good
early adopters for PIC.edu.
- Randy Stout, incoming co-chair of the Internet2 K20 Initiative, noted that
lack of common IM tools is an area of concern for that group as well. Randy
also noted that the Kansas state libraries are making use of the Quova 
location
service (http://www.quova.com/).
- There was general agreement that the PIC.edu project needs to start with a
clear focus on the basics: a Jabber server to which people can declare their
presence information. Later we may add features like client discovery of
location, and selective sharing of that information.
- Deke stressed the need for a cookbook approach to the project: get it to 
work;
reimplement and document each step; give that information -- the cookbook -- 
to
others to use in deployment; evaluate the results and incorporate them into 
the
next version of the cookbook. This approach has worked well for the SIP.edu
project.
- Dave pointed out that "pic.edu" is the URL for the Palomar Institute of
Cosmetology, so we might want to consider a different name for the project.
- The group also spent some time reviewing and revising Deke's slides for the
PIC track session the following morning.

At the October 11 PIC track session
(events.internet2.edu/2007/fall-mm/sessionDetails.cfm?session=3438&event=273),
Deke presented the results from the PIC survey and plans for the PIC.edu
project. Attendance was on the low side (about 14), but the presentation was
well-received and there was a good discussion of problems the project will
need to address, such as how to handle invitations and whether to update buddy
lists automatically.