Managing, Ordering, Distributing, Exposing, & Registering telephone Numbers
charter-ietf-modern-01

Since I was on leave and Ben was shepherding this work until very recently, I did not have a chance to provide comments on the charter until now. I think overall the charter is good but I have a bunch of suggestions to make it crisper and more understandable for people who are new to this work. In the edit below I've tried to remove some of the redundant language. I edited the first paragraph and removed the example problems, which included a lot of domain-specific terms that were not properly explained and didn't add much overall. I added STIR to the list of other relevant IETF WGs. The substance of the charter hasn't changed, but I'd like the folks on the mailing list to review the changes before I put them into the tracker.

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The MODERN working group will define a set of Internet-based mechanisms for the purposes of managing and resolving telephone numbers (TNs) in an IP environment. Existing mechanisms for these purposes face obsolescence as the voice communications infrastructure evolves to IP technology and new applications for TNs become possible. The traditional model of a TN having an association to a single service provider and a single application is breaking down. Its use as a network locator is going away, but its use as an identifier for an individual or an organization will remain for some time. Devices, applications, and network tools increasingly need to manage TNs, including requesting and acquiring TN delegations from authorities. The output of the working group should make distribution, acquisition, and management of TNs simpler for all entities involved.

The working group will define an information management framework for the roles and functions involved in associating information with one or more TNs in an IP environment.  The working group will also identify protocol mechanisms to support the interactions between the functions defined by the framework. This includes either recommending or defining protocol mechanisms for acquiring, associating and resolving TNs, with a preference for use of existing protocol mechanisms. TNs may either be managed in a hierarchical tree, or in a distributed registry. The protocol mechanism for acquiring TNs will provide an enrollment process for the entities that use and manage TNs. 

The protocol mechanism for resolving TNs will allow entities such as service providers, devices, and applications to access data related to TNs. Maintaining reliability, real-time application performance, and security and privacy for both the data and the protocol interactions are primary considerations. The working group will take into consideration existing IETF work including STIR, ENUM, SPEERMINT, DRINKS and SCIM.

The work of this group will focus on TNs, as defined in RFC3966, and blocks of TNs, that are used to initiate communication with another user of a service. There is an expectation that aspects of the architecture and protocols defined by the working group will be reusable for other user-focused identifiers. Any such extensions or reuse of MODERN mechanisms are out of scope for the MODERN working group. Solutions and mechanisms created by the working group will be flexible enough to accommodate different policies for TN assignment and management, for example those established by different regulatory agencies.

The working group will deliver the following:

- An architecture overview, including high level requirements and security/privacy considerations

- A description of the enrollment processes for existing and new TNs including any modifications to metadata related to those TNs

- A description of protocol mechanisms for accessing contact information associated with enrollments

- A description of mechanisms for resolving information related to TNs