This week IETF is in town! It’s rare enough that the organizers of JSConf.asia last year gave us a slot to present the standardisation process, and why it was so important to participate. Moreover, one only get better by learning from the bests, and all the internet experts are at IETF. If you’re really serious about internet technology, as an engineer or as a team leader you go and send your team learn with the best, even more so when there is no plane ticket to buy or hotel cost associated. Since IETF publishes the list of attendees, we took the time to extract the list of attendees, to see the braves.
| 239 | CHENG | KOKHONG | APPLE |
| 1074 | Quek | Alyssa | Apple |
| 1289 | Tan | Peng Joo | Ciena Communications |
| 322 | Dogan | Hrvoje | Cisco |
| 998 | ONG | Nicholas | Citic telecommunications CPC |
| 451 | gouaillard | alexandre | CoSMo |
| 1133 | Roux | Ludovic | CoSMo Software |
| 1102 | Recio | Jose | Cosmo Software |
| 114 | Ben younes | Radhoine | COSMO SOFTWARE CONSULTING |
| 1370 | VU | Nam | CoSMo Software Consulting |
| 233 | Chen | Ruo Fei | CoSMo Software Consulting Pte Ltd |
| 244 | Chia | Kelvin | Equinix |
| 945 | Naing | Win | Equinix |
| 1192 | Sethuraman | Vijayakumar | Equinix |
| 318 | Djatmiko | Diko | Extreme Networks |
| 1386 | WANG | Guilin | Huawei |
| 1468 | YANG | Yanjiang | Huawei International Pte. Ltd |
| 792 | Liu | Fei | Huawei International Pte. Ltd. |
| 1385 | Wang | Haiguang | Huawei International Pte. Ltd. |
| 235 | Chen | Joyce | ICANN |
| 804 | Low | Jia-Rong | ICANN |
| 683 | Koh | Lian Chong | IMDA |
| 457 | Grewal | Harinderpal | IMDA Singapore |
| 301 | de Guzman | Noelle Francesca | Internet Society |
| 1220 | Singh | Rajnesh | Internet Society |
| 501 | HAZENBERG | ANITA | INTERPOL |
| 827 | Marden | Bradley | INTERPOL |
| 812 | Ma | Shaowen | Juniper |
| 142 | Boey | Alan | Moratel International Pte Ltd |
| 773 | Lim | Hock Koon | Moratel International Pte Ltd |
| 448 | Gong | Deli | National University of Singapore |
| 630 | Kang | Min Suk | National University of Singapore |
| 304 | De Wilde | Bart | Nokia |
| 325 | Dolganow | Andrew | Nokia |
| 740 | Lee | Byung Ki | Nokia |
| 1375 | Walsh | Brian | Nokia |
| 741 | Lee | Jeffrey | Phillip Capital Management |
| 893 | Mito | Wataru | SECOM CO.,LTD. |
| 561 | Hughes | Lawrence | Sixscape Communications |
| 240 | Cheong | Yang | StarHub |
| 682 | Koh | Rong Qing | StarHub Limited |
| 442 | Goh | Boon Leong | StarHub Ltd |
| 965 | NGUYEN | CUONG | StarHub Ltd |
| 1400 | Wee | Meng Sie | StarHub Ltd |
| 1282 | Szalachowski | Pawel | SUTD |
| 1473 | Yap | Chern Nam | Temasek Polytechnic, School of Informatics and IT |
| 984 | Ohba | Yoshihiro | Toshiba Memory Singapore Pte Ltd |
| 214 | Cawidrone | Yanik | Yanik |
| 151 | BOPE | Chistian | |
| 306 | Deckers | Sebastiaan | |
| 316 | Diraviam | MANIAM | |
| 517 | Heng | Valerie | |
| 1053 | pillay | harish | |
| 1082 | Rajagopalan | Ram Kishore | |
| 1308 | Thang | Michael | |
| 1430 | Wong | Jeremias | |
| 1431 | Wong | Eric | |
As you can see on the list, both CoSMo (6) and Starhub (5) had the biggest representation at IETF this time, followed by Nokia and Huawei (4) then equinox (3). By comparing with the attendance from SG at IETF’99 in Pragues (8), it’s easy to see who is actively involved all-year-long:
| 548 | gouaillard | alexandre | CoSMo | SG |
| 994 | Ma | Shaowen | Juniper | SG |
| 361 | Deckers | Sebastiaan | SG | |
| 386 | Dolganow | Andrew | Nokia | SG |
| 1329 | Recio | Jose Maria | CoSMo Software Consulting, Pte Ltd | SG |
| 1378 | Roux | Ludovic | CoSMo Software Consulting Pvt Limited | |
| 1700 | Walsh | Brian | Nokia | SG |
| 1713 | Wang | Haiguang | Huawei International Pte. Ltd. | SG |
While some other standardisation committees like W3C require a membership for attendance, the IETF wants to keep the internet accessible for everyone. No company membership, only individual representation. That’s also why there is a strict rotation rule for the 3 meetings a year: once in the americas, once in europe, once in asia, so that everybody can join in the flesh at least once a year without having to travel too far. That’s also why the remote participation is also free (as in gratis, or as in beer).
One can appreciate the efforts of Sebastiaan Deckers, a Singapore-based tech. consultant who, even in the absence of a corporate sponsor like Nokia, Huawei or Juniper, is attending all the IETF meetings remotely (see above). His personal investment in learning the cutting edge technologies and defining what the Internet will be tomorrow definitely paid has he recently released his own HTTP/2 hosting service which, according to a few early high-profile adopters, is providing unprecedented speed. Differentiation by innovation!
Moved https://t.co/Jv1xNPhWNC over to https://t.co/QmhMH4GKBc ~2.1s load time down to ~1.2s reliably. Thanks @sebdeckers for the help!
— Thomas Gorissen (@serrynaimo) October 23, 2017
At CoSMo we believe to Differentiation by innovation. The core team has been trained as Researchers, and hold Research or faculty positions at the best Universities and research Institutions in the world (KEIO, Caltech, Harvard, A*STAR, French CNRS, Japanese Space Agency, …). As the result, innovation is at the core of what we do.
Innovation cannot be taught, and most of the technologies we work on did not exist before we started working on it. We redefine the possible, we make a difference. As you won’t find people with experience on these matters, you need to create and generate this unique experience. We take in a lot of master students every semester, make them work on cutting-edge real-world project with external collaborators and build their expertise that way. Our last graduate did his Master Thesis on a Google project and was co-supervised by Google WebRTC Project manager from Stockholm! The one before that went on to work more than a month in California on real time gaming project to gain experience of different ways of working (and attend IIT-RTC in chicago, Kranky geek in SF, visit google campus and attend a meeting with Apple WebRTC team at 1 Infinity Loop).
All our interns, and engineers, are being sponsored to travel to conferences to present their work, where they get the credit they deserve. We are for example just back from the Technical Plenary Meeting of the W3C where Singapore Permanent Resident Soares CHEN presented his outstanding work on WebRTC JS API compliance testing, helping bringing the webrtc 1.0 Specification to completion.
As a conclusion, we would like to send a simple message. Participating in standards is hard, and is long. However it is not difficult nor costly, and it is a relatively easy way for one to make a difference through innovation, especially in a location like Singapore were talent is rare. Do not simply claim to participate, by listing the logos on your website like some companies do in Singapore, first because the registration list will tell, but mainly because you have so much to gain from actual participation that it would be a shame not to. IETF might not come back close to your place anytime soon, but remote participation has been made easy and free, start investing in your future!
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[ Above ] The CoSMo Software Team @ IETF’99 in Prague (Hilton)
[ Below ] The Team @ IETF’100 in Singapore (Office’s Roof Deck)