Folks,

Last week, I sent an email to a fairly large number of people wherein I raised an issue: there seems to be a need for a place to go for people to ask questions about signaling protocols, implementation, deployment, and various issues related thereto in the area of videoconferencing. There are various mailing lists and such, but people are scattered all over with no "right place" to go to ask questions. I get a lot of questions directed my way, simply because people do not know where else to ask.

We are hosting a number of public mailing lists on Packetizer, some lists are hosted by the IMTC, others at Columbia and Ohio State, etc. Perhaps some of those lists are perfect for engineers or those working on standards, but I've noted that end users, especially, have no place to ask questions. Also, there are lots of questions related to open source projects that get posted to various lists, only because those products happen to use a particular protocol, etc.

So, I took a poll asking whether folks would prefer a web-based discussion forum, email list(s), or a "nothing else is needed". Over 50% of those who responded to the poll indicated that they would like to see a discussion forum for VoIP, videoconferencing, and data conferencing discussions.

So in response, I set up this site: http://forums.packetizer.com.

The structure might not be perfect and since I had to write the ATOM/RSS code myself over the weekend, I will not declare it to be bug free just yet. Nonetheless, the board is running a stable release of phpBB3 and ought to work well. I certainly welcome any comments you have and will try to improve the structure and operation as issues are raised.

I do hope you find this useful and I would encourage people with expertise in a particular area to join. I will personally be answering questions, as I have for years, but there are certainly others with better qualifications to answer questions in some areas than me. If anyone is interested in a moderator role on the site, let me know.

If you have any questions at all, please don't hesitate to ask me.

Paul