#sipland

In the SIP community we all sometimes enjoy discussions of SIP compliance mixed with interoperability and a healthy dose of troubleshooting and often a touch of call and message flow complexity. Some folks enjoy this {much} more than others. It is always an interesting barometer of someone’s style to see how they address questions of interoperability.

I want to take a moment to explore some of this. I wasn’t intending to do this at all. I initially wanted to talk about a interesting SIP interoperability problem our team ran into and solved without ever emailing, calling, or discussing with the other vendor. Why? Because it is the opposite of what we sometimes see happen. I’ll save that situation for my next post and launch into perhaps a more stormy area here…

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It often seems that there is a missing social construct related to discussions of interoperability in this community. The missing piece of normal social interactions can be blunted in a number of ways. One perplexing issue is how people who work on communications products communicate.

Terse emails or messages of other forms between people who have never connected personally can be the norm; and are horrible. Assigning blame can be of the utmost priority. Laziness often inhibits the conversation and discovery of underlying issues and best solutions. A feeling of higher status or commercial relationship driven superiority often comes into play.

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Many humans take the approach similar to “I just quickly read the part of a RFC that I think applies, it backs up my base assumption that I am right, here are 30 lines of quoted text without explanation or context, this must be your problem.”

Each time you observe this kind of conversation about to take place it takes some zen perspective or meditative thought on behalf of the receiver before taking the proverbial bait and jumping into the debate.

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I think I would advise everyone to add a little context to the next conversation they have or the message they send.  I think what many people who try this will find is that when you put more into a conversation you get more out of a conversation.