Future of the TRADE Working Group

[Eastlake III Donald-LDE008 <Donald.Eastlake@motorola.com>]

Hi,

The poor attendance at the last several TRADE working group
meetings (approximately zero in November 2003 in Minneapolis)
and, even more important, the very low traffic level on the
TRADE WG mailing list over the past year and more, indicate
that there is now relatively little IETF community interest
in this working group. About the only evidence that there
is still community interest is the 148 email addresses
subscribed to the TRADE WG mailing list.

Although the group has accomplished a lot over the years,
producing the IOTP v1 document, many documents supporting IOTP
v1, and good drafts in the digital voucher and ECML areas,
it seems like a good idea to finish getting the current drafts
through and wind up its activities.

The remaining milestones in the current version of the WG
Charter, http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/trade-charter.html,
all relate to new documents on IOTP and an IOTP v2. This
seems to be the area with the least interest. I therefore
think that these remaining milestones should be dropped.
Similarly, the two WG drafts that have not yet been submitted
to the IESG, draft-ietf-trade-iotp-http2-00.txt and
draft-ietf-trade-srv-higher-services-01.txt, should be
detached from the working group and allowed to time out.

The four drafts which are now pending with the IESG,
however, in my opinion, are useful work and should be
progressed to RFC pubication:

1. The -papi- draft had one minor IESG comment, has
been revised and posted. and I think it likely that it
will be approved relatively soon.

2/3: The two voucher drafts had slightly more comments
but have been revised and posted for a while and no
negative comments have appeared. I plan to post a
separate message initiating a two week working group
last call for comments on these drafts.

4: By far the most IESG comments were on the ECML v2
draft. This was intended to become a Proposed Standard.
But, since it seems unclear that there will be the
interest needed to progress it along the standards
track, I am inclinde to change the target status of
this to Informational instead or Proposed Standard.
This would make it easier to get approval and would
remove the expectation that further work would be
done to progess it along the standards track. But it
would still become a permanent document as an RFC.

Feel free to post any comments on the above ideas.

If the working group is dissolved, the mailing list
would stay in place and a new working group could
always be chartered in this area in the future.

Thanks,
Donald
===========================================================
 Donald E. Eastlake III       Donald.Eastlake@Motorola.com
 Motorola Laboratories               1-508-786-7554 (work)
 111 Locke Drive                     1-508-634-2066 (home)
 Marlboro, MA 01752 USA