The SIP Forum is member-driven. What we do is up to you. Learn how to advance the industry — Read our Request below!

The newly-elected Board of the SIP Forum met recently to discuss the state of the SIP industry, and what things the SIP Forum and its members can do in order "... to advance the adoption of products and services based on SIP," which is the mission of the Forum.

We (the Board) have some suggestions, and this is a request for you to respond and share your thoughts about them, and to solicit your help in some work we believe needs done.

HISTORY

It seems unarguable that the most significant things the Forum has accomplished historically include:

• SIPit events, which likely have the most significant impact of anything we do in the SIP industry;
• general promotion of SIP through our website, mailing lists (despite all the "unsubscribe" madness), and our speakers bureau;
• and most recently, the creation of the SIPconnect Technical Recommendation (for SIP PBX <---> service provider trunking), and the IPR infrastructure we put in place to facilitate creating more Technical Recommendations like this.

These are things we expect to continue to do. (Thought there may want to be some refinement of our general promotional efforts to focus on specific areas of ongoing activity (vs. broadly-targeted general evangelism, which seems less needed now than it was 5 years ago.))

PLAN

The Board's general sense is that there are (at least) four areas that could obviously benefit from industry attention:

1. Make a more significant impact in eliminating the impact of Network Address Translation (NAT) / firewall devices on SIP/RTP traffic;
2. Help evangelize the how, when, and why of SIP over TLS;
3. Continue (restart) the advancement of the SIP Phone Profiles Technical Recommendation;
4. Continue the advancement of the SIPconnect Technical Recommendation.

Whether these are, in fact, the most pressing issues can be debated. However, even if there are other issues, these four are certainly worthy of attention.

REQUEST

We (the Board) humbly invite you to offer your thoughts about how we, as a volunteer-based member association, can attack these issues. At a minimum, tell us your thoughts about what you think the most important issue is by taking our poll (see the upper-right corner of this web page.)

Better yet, use our mailing lists to have a serious discussion about what we can do.

The Board has some ideas of its own about how to address the last item (4). We'll come up with a specific plan on how to advance both the written document, and to test implementations at future SIPit events. We'll then share that plan with various subsets of the entire membership where seems like the work needs to get done (e.g. the technical WG, marketing WG, test event WG, etc.)

But we invite YOU to help create progress on the other issues. For example, we think "Making the NAT problem go away" is keenly high on the priority list, but we're not sure exactly what the SIP Forum can do about it. Should we, for instance, make an investment to deploy equipment and software for online testing of ICE implementations? No? Then what's *your* idea of how we could help knock down this problem?

There could be "marketing" (communications), or technical, or bully-pulpit style actions that we could take for any or all of the above. What should we do, where? And who is willing to work on it with/for us?

This is your Forum. We are a vehicle you can use to help solve your SIP problems. We invite you to leverage the Forum by participating in the discussion. We look forward to your insights.