Subject: SENSE> Minutes of the Boulder meeting (30 Oct 97)

From: Jay Martin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 02 Nov 1997 10:54:01 -0500

The Sense project conducted a meeting during the PWG meetings
held in Boulder, Colorado, during the week of October 27.

The project secretary was unable to attend, so these minutes come
from my personal notes of the discussions.  Since I am the project
chairman and also served as the Sense discussion moderator, it is
quite possible that some details may be missing in this notes.

	...jay

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The meeting was orginally scheduled to be held the afternoon of
Thursday, Oct 30; however, due to an interest in the subject of
event notification by the IPP project, the morning of Oct 30 was
used as a sort of "joint meeting" of both IPP and Sense.  The IPP
project expressed interest in the Sense event notification design
for potential use in the IPP environment.

Significant interest in Sense was shown by some of the IPP members,
most notably Randy Turner, who suggested that Sense should be
written up and submitted as an IETF experimental protocol.  (Randy
explained that, unlike standards-track and informational drafts,
experimental protocols merely present work that has already been
implemented and is how being publicly advertised for consideration
by interested parties.  Randy also mentioned that if a standards-
track effort is later started, then the effort should proceed more
rapidly, since existing implementations were already in practice.
(Randy: did I get this right?)

The essential elements of Sense were presented, and various walk-
throughs of system operation were described, along with discussions
of some of the key motivating requirements for Sense. A comprehensive
description of the Sense architecture was not presented; in hind-
sight, the lack of such a presentation seemed to hinder rapid
understanding of Sense by some of the attendees.  Everyone was
encouraged to visit the PWG website (http://www.pwg.org/sense) and
examine the public Sense documentation, in particular the document
describing the set of initial Sense requirements and constraints
(ftp://ftp.pwg.org/pub/pwg/sense/reqmts.txt).

It was pointed out that Sense--like IPP--does not currently provide
a security mechanism; rather, Sense also expects to leverage a future
standard security mechanism once it appears on the IETF horizon.

No substantive conclusions or recommendations resulted from the IPP
portion of the Sense discussions, although the IPP folks requested
the Sense project consider the needs of IPP and attempt a clear
integration between the two, if possible.  Jay Martin explained that
the current design and implementation is specifically oriented to
enterprise environments in which the challenge is to provide a
framework for management of a (potentially large) collection of
shared network printers; for a single printer in the "Internet"
environment--specifically one behind a firewall--the Sense design
may very well be overkill, although not entirely useless.

The focus of the afternoon Sense meeting was to discuss whether the
Sense project should be shutdown due to lack of interest.  It was
pointed out that Sense has taken a backseat (or perhaps a spot in
the trunk) with respect to PWG priorities.  However, now that almost
all PWG projects were in a state of wrap-up (PMP, JMP, IPP v1.0),
perhaps now would be the perfect time to ramp up on Sense activities,
assuming there was continuing interest within the PWG.  The consensus
of the group was that the effort should not be shutdown, that there
is still considerable interest in this activity by many attendees.

Jay Martin concluded the meeting by saying more discussion of Sense
is needed on the mailing list, and that he will attempt to foster new
discussions on the Sense mailing list ([email-masked]) in the month
of November.  Assuming group discussion occurs, a Sense meeting will
be scheduled for the upcoming Los Angeles meeting in December.

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