Mailing list for Voluntary Access Control Working Group

Ted Hardie (hardie@naic.nasa.gov)
Fri, 8 Sep 1995 16:23:04 -0700 (PDT)


This announcement is being sent to the IETF, ratings, and www-talk lists.

At the summer meeting of the IETF, a BOF was held to discuss the role
of the IETF in the creation of a voluntary access protocol (ratings
protocol) for the Internet. The consensus of the group was that the IETF is
an appropriate place to work on the creation of such a protocol.
The preliminary consensus of the group (as I understand it), was that
it would be best to create a protocol separate from any of the current
application protocols (like http), but specific to the task of providing
third-party ratings on internet resources (in other words, not to tackle
the more general question of creating a meta-data service). The group
was also quite clearly opposed to the IETF being involved in determining
what the ratings should be. Its interest was in providing a method by
which a client could communicate with a ratings service. The group also
seemed to feel that by providing a generalized method of communication
for this exchange, it could enable a wider variety of ratings providers
to participate in the process of providing information on Internet resources
(and thus avoid, for example, linking ratings to a particular browser or
Internet service provider).

The mailing list vac-wg@naic.nasa.gov has been set up for those
interested in completing the charter for this working group. After a
working group charter has been hammered out and a chair named, these
will be sent up to the IESG for the formal blessing of the working
group; work on the protocol can proceed, of course, during this
blessing period, provided there is rough consensus on the goals of the
working group.

To subscribe, send a message to listmanager@naic.nasa.gov with a the
following in the *body* of the message:

subscribe vac-wg

You may also subscribe using the vac-wg-request@naic.nasa.gov address;
for that, simple send a "subscribe" (with no list name) in the body of
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Regards,
Ted Hardie
NAIC