Report
In late July, 40 people came together in Stockholm to talk about HTTP over three days. These people included not only those active in the HTTP Working Group, but also engineers that don't necessarily have the time to track such efforts closely.
As was the case last year, we deliberately kept the schedule loose and open, to encourage discussion in the room. You can see the talks that we invited to spur discussion on the agenda.
We also introduced lightning talks this year, to let people bring up topics on the fly. This was overwhelmingly successful, with lots of interesting discussions in a remarkably short amount of time.
Several attendees have written up their thoughts about the workshop; see Daniel Stenberg's writeup of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday; Stefan Eissing's thoughts, and Cory Benfield's summary.
So far, the feedback from our participant survey is generally very positive, with comments like:
It helped me gain a much broader perspective on the uses of HTTP and the way we increasingly need to design for a broader number of use cases as we move on.
and
The opportunity to meet in person with implementers from the entire HTTP ecosystem was fascinating, and all the f2f discussions and opinion-sharing are really valuable (and a huge time-saving compared to following ietf/whatwg threads on a daily basis ;)
and
[The best thing about it was] getting people from all relevant parties in the same room. Hearing people from different aspects of HTTP comment on the same subjects and make really quick agreements or disagreements on things.
and
As someone who isn't part of the normal IETF process, hearing about what's going on and having a chance to give feedback to those with influence over the process is incredibly valuable.
Out of 23 respondents so far, 18 "strongly agree" that the Workshop was valuable, and 5 "agree." As was the case last year, they favoured the discussion time (both in the room and in the hallways) over presentations, although the presentations have had only positive feedback as well.
We received a number of suggestions about how to improve the workshop. Leading them were encouragement to improve diversity (something that the PC strongly desires), manage the discussion more efficiently, and to make the selection process more transparent.
It's not clear that there will; we don't want to hold them out of habit, and it's clear that getting everyone in one place once a year is expensive in a number of ways. Given that QUIC is likely to be active in the next year, we'll likely wait until it's clear that another workshop would be successful before making a decision.
We particularly want to acknowledge the generous support of our sponsors; IIS (general sponsor), Mozilla (workshop dinner), and Cloudflare (welcome drinks).
Thanks to Daniel Stenberg for handling local arrangements!
The attendees of the 2016 HTTP Workshop were (in alphabetical order):
- Alan Frindell (Facebook)
- Alexey Melnikov (IESG)
- Andreas Garkuscha (Apple)
- Anna Brunstrom (KAU)
- Anne van Kesteren (Mozilla)
- Artur Bergman (Fastly)
- Brad Fitzpatrick (Google / Go)
- Bryan Call (Yahoo! / Apache)
- Cory Benfield (HP / hyper)
- Craig Taylor (BBC)
- Daniel Stenberg (Mozilla)
- Eric Rescorla (Mozilla)
- Francesco Chemolli (Facebook / Squid)
- Gabriel Montenegro (Microsoft)
- Herve Ruellan (Canon)
- Hooman Beheshti (Fastly)
- Ilya Grigorik (Google)
- Jana Iyengar (Google)
- Julian Reschke (Greenbytes)
- Kaoru Maeda (Lepidum)
- Kazuho Oku (DeNA / h2o)
- Leif Hedstrom (Apple / Apache)
- Magnus Westerlund (Ericsson)
- Mark Nottingham (Akamai)
- Martin Thomson (Mozilla)
- Mike Bishop (Microsoft)
- Moritz Steiner (Akamai)
- Moto Ishizawa (Z Lab Corporation / Yahoo! Japan)
- Natasha Rooney (GSMA)
- Nick Sullivan (Cloudflare)
- Patrick Mcmanus (Mozilla)
- Poul-Henning Kamp (Varnish)
- Ranjeeth Dasineni (Facebook)
- Scott Marshall (Apple)
- Stefan Eissing (Greenbytes / Apache)
- Subodh Iyengar (Facebook)
- Tatsuhiro Tsujikawa (nghttp2)
- Vlad Krasnov (Cloudflare)
- Wenbo Zhu (Google)
- Yoav Weiss (Akamai)
