IETF meeting in India by 2020

Let me first explain, what IETF is? It will help those who are not aware about it.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet.

One of my dreams for India is to bring IETF meeting to India by 2020. And I believe I need your help in realizing this for our engineering community and for our country.

You may ask, why such a dream? Let me tell you more about this.

IETF meetings bring in the brightest minds working on next generation problems at one location. I attended my first IETF meeting in 2003. I met some of the people whom I had interacted with only through e-mails. I also got an opportunity to discuss few problems I was thinking about and found people very approachable. I got some very good suggestions. I also participated in couple of free flowing discussions in working group meetings. This experience helped me a lot. I later attended two more IETF meetings and every time it was just wonderful.

So based on my experience, I would like more people to participate in this. Now, while someone can participate in IETF without attending its meeting, I believe attending a meeting provides a chance to interact with people working in the same area/domain/problem-space. IETF meetings not only creates an environment for healthy, constructive and highly enriching discussion, it also helps in newbies to get a chance to learn from more experience folks.

I believe we have world class architects and engineers in India. Lots of Indian Companies have conceptualized, designed and developed highly innovative products, solutions but our participation in IETF has not been reflecting this so far.

I think our engineering community needs to increase our participation in IETF in order to:

1. Help build a better and safer internet
2. Define, architect and build next generation networking technologies
3. Put India as the next innovation centre in the world

I think our participation in IETF will also help our engineers to

1. Get wider exposure and understanding of the domain
2. Increase the overall quality of their work
3. Increase their’s and their company’s overall brand value

This is why I am daring to see this dream and I am hopeful that you will help me realize this for all of us.

Now to realize this, I feel we need to do following:

1. We need to create awareness about IETF (Understand how IETF works).  We need to bring awareness in colleges, private sectors companies and public sectors companies. While I am working on figuring out how to do it, I would love to know your suggestions on how to do this. Please do leave me a comment with your suggestion.
2. We need to bring in the engineers participating in IETF under one roof. This will create an environment which can be used as catalyst for IETF participation. People who are already participating in IETF should provide the helping hand to those who are looking forward to participate.
3. We need to bring in support from our government for sponsoring couple of people to attend IETF meetings every year. We would also need to get government support for sponsoring part of the IETF meeting when it comes to India.
4. Bring in support from Indians who are working abroad and participate in IETF. Support could include providing mentoring, sharing their experience, encouraging people etc. (More on India’s involvement in the IETF)