The first BOF (Birds of a Feather) for the AT Protocol will be held at the upcoming Internet Engineering Task Force meeting 124 in Montreal on Wednesday, November 5th at 09:30 - 11:30 (Eastern time).
See this earlier announcement:
BOFs are used to gauge whether there’s enough momentum and consensus around a topic to warrant more formal standardization work within the IETF.
We need to show the IETF that there is a whole community building on top of atproto other than Bluesky.
This is a crucial moment for the atproto community since this is the process to get governance of atproto out of the hands of the company and stewarded by a public group that we all can participate in.
@dholms.xyz and @bnewbold.net will be there in Montreal, and there will be a few other devs you probably know. (Afterwards there will be some community sessions too if you are in the area!)
But this message is for the rest of us that can’t make it to Montreal in person: you can participate remotely.
It would be excellent if we could show up in numbers and let the IETF know that there is “momentum”!
Here is how you can get involved:
- Set up a free Datatracker account: https://datatracker.ietf.org
- Get a ticket to the event. You can pay for one day here (always nice if you can expense it!) or you can apply for a Fee Waiver here (it is instant, you get a coupon code for your ticket)
- On the day you can log into the meeting by going to the Agenda and clicking on the little purple camera button.
This launches the Meetecho WebRTC app that runs in the browser. I recommend you do this before the meeting since there is a pre-flight test to get your camera and mic access and all that.
Here is a little video guide on how it works:
Once you are in the meeting you will be able to hear and see all the presentations, participate in chat, and get in the queue for questions! The back channel chat is very active for these kinds of sessions so it would be amazing if someone from the remote community could answer questions from the IETF in there.
To get prepared you can also check out Bryan and Daniel’s I-D on AT architecture here:
And their AT repository and sync draft here:
I am on a couple of IETF mailing lists and there is already discussion about the architecture and 
decentralization , but also on the problem of change control and where the IETF should stand. Many of you may have views on these topics! So come to the meeting! I hope to see you there!