User:Dale Innis/Group IM in OGP

This page is to capture thoughts about how Group IM will / should / might work in the Open Grid Protocol. It is seeded with some ideas extracted from recent Zero Linden office hours and AWGroupies meetings.

Use Cases

• A group wants to do predefined-group IM very much like SL / OpenSim Group IM today, only cross-grid (cross-domain)
• A group wants to do adhoc-group IM (i.e. "Friends Conference") very much like SL / OpenSim Group IM today, only cross-grid (cross-domain)
• Bridging (in any of various detailed senses) between OGP-based Group IM in some virtual world domain(s), and group IM in other contexts (IRC channels on existing IRC servers, Jabber servers, AIM, etc, etc, etc)
• One-to-one IM as a limiting case of any and all of the above (i.e. can the various approaches to the Group IM use-cases also serve for person-to-person IM)
• Spatial chat (i.e. can any or all of the IM solutions above also handle spatial chat, where everyone within range can hear what's being said? The answer may be "no", or "yes, but it's not the best solution", or whatever)

Requirements

• In at least many use-cases, someone viewing a Group IM message should know with high confidence that it was really sent by the apparent sender.
• In at least some use-cases, it will be desirable to allow messages where the sender is *not* known with high confidence, but the messages are still delivered, and marked as insecure-sender.
• In at least many use-cases, someone posting a Group IM message should know with high confidence that it will be delivered only to bona fide group members.
• The solution should scale to, at the very least, simple extrapolations of the current SL group IM usage patterns.

Approaches

• Sai suggests that, as a very first experiment and proof of concept, we move Group IM into the AD (Agent Domain), and allow inter-domain IMs by using the AD as a relay point.
• Various people have suggested that, as the underlying IM infrastructure, we make use of IRC or Jabber or something else that already exists. This still leaves open various questions, such as how identities are mapped and authentication done, but it has been suggested that these are easy to solve. We will attempt to extract from those making these suggestions just how they see it working. Preferably without violating the Geneva Convention.
• It has of course been suggested that the underlying group IM mechanism be pluggable. This is a fine idea, but we must still define the interface that a qualifying plugin has to implement.