1. Meeting Summary
The preliminary agenda is available at Prelminary Workshop Agenda. The workshop began with a welcome and introduction by Dave Thewlis, the Executive Director of CalConnect, who gave a brief overview of CalConnect, its relationship with the IETF, and how CalConnect got involved with vCard in the first place. (Summary: as soon as you start to do calendaring you get involved in address books and vCard pops up.) CalConnect members have expressed for some time that “something ought to be done about vCard” but CalConnect has not to this point had the resources to do anything, nor clarity on what ought to be done and what if anything should be undertaken by CalConnect. The goal of this workshop therefore was to see if there was general agreement on what the problems were, and what should be undertaken by the IETF. Then as an ancillary, what should additionally be undertaken by another entity (such as CalConnect) and is CalConnect the right place.
Cyrus Daboo of Apple provided an overview presentation of the problem and related issues, which included a summarization of the 25 or so responses to the CalConnect questionnaire on vCard issues. vCard Problems and Related Issues. This was followed by a presentation from the OMA DS discussing vCard and OMA DS (formerly SyncML) issues, and a brief discussion on other related work or standards in other bodies.
The group then conducted a considerable discussion of vCard problems, what needed to be fixed, and what should be done if a vCard revision was undertaken. There was considerable agreement that a new specification should have the name changed, possibly to “iCard”. The final list of identified items is at List of Desired Elements for a vCard Revision
A key point was that if a vCard revision happens, the resultant specification needs to be significant enough and offer enough new things to make the business case for converting to it to the many organizations which support vCard today (most of which haven’t even gone to vCard 3 yet). Related to that is that promotion, publicity, use cases and requirements, and interoperability testing need to happen in parallel with the actual specification revision.
The workshop discussed briefly whether the right thing to do was to scrap vCard and develop an entirely new specification, but the consensus was that while that might be the “right” thing to do from a theoretical viewpoint, it was probably not practical. On the other hand, as noted above we need to avoid simply tackling the easy bits because nobody will adopt what amounts to a minor revision — after all they didn’t do so the last time.
Chris Newman, IETF Area Director, stated that the amount of interest (and concern) had convinced him that the work should go forward in the IETF to revise vCard, and that he had possible candidates for document editors and co-chairs for a working group, so he intended to initiate the process of charter development.
Discussion on what needed to be done to provide input to the working group included use cases, requirements, results of interoperability testing to determine minimum interoperable subsets, etc., in addition to ultimately promoting the resultant specification. The first part of this needs to happen quickly, if possible no later than the March 2008 IETF meeting to provide something for the working group to start with. Discussion of possible venues for the work did not identify any significant alternatives to CalConnect presuming that CalConnect can undertake the work. The topic of allowing non-member-representatives to participate in the CalConnect work was discussed briefly without any final decisions; however CalConnect is in the process of adopting mechanisms to allow external public review and comment on selected work items and does have some other ways in which this could be enabled on a case-by-case basis (primarily the ability to include identified “industry experts” not from CalConnect members in the deliberations of a TC).
From the CalConnect perspective, undertaking the work requires new resources; the available technical resources are committed to existing Technical Committees. However, several non-members have indicated that they are interested enough in the work to consider joining CalConnect in order to participate.
CalConnect will develop a draft charter for a vCard Technical Committee, which will identify the scope of the work, expected work products and timelines, and will do so on the public vcard-workshop-l mailing list which was set up to complement the vCard Workshop. This will allow all interested parties, by joining that list if they are not already subscribed, to be informed on what is being proposed and develop a clearer understanding of what their commitment might be if they decide to participate in the work. CalConnect expects that the development of this charter and solicitation of volunteers to help will take several weeks. The CalConnect TC CHAIRS and Steering Committee will then make a final decision on whether to undertake the work based on the availability of the necessary resources.