Hackathon encourage developers to collaborate and develop utilities, ideas, sample code and solutions that show practical implementations of IETF standards. This is also an excellent mechanism to participate in IETF by bringing in the implementation experience and providing useful comments to in-progress standards. Some of the Indian contributors have been taking part in IETF Hackathon and Bits and Bytes activities in the past.
IETF 96 Berlin, there were multiple proposal from India. Dhruv for Huawei-India, championed the Path Computation Element (PCE) based controller over ONOS. This project received the award for the best feedback to IETF/WG. The participation continued in IETF 97 Seoul, with projects in Abstraction and Control of TE networks (ACTN), Yang, Service Function Chaining (SFC) etc.
As part of the work done during Hackathon, demo was given during the Bits-n-Bytes event.
Hackathon is an excellent way for implementers, students, technologist to increase the pace and relevance of IETF work through running code. The implementation feedback to the WG is useful as it validates the standards and highlight issues, ambiguity, whats missing etc. Various open source projects have been featured in the Hackathon included ONOS, OpenDaylight, VPP, Joy etc.
Hackathon is happening on the Saturday-Sunday before the IETF week this time for IETF 98 as well. With various interesting technologies on board. Find details in the wiki.