Some general information about areas of interest to 3GPP delegates.
Who can participate as a delegate?
How do I connect to the meeting server?
Participant lists – why are they important?
Change of employer, restructuring of organization, etc.
I am a new delegate. How do I decide which TSGs or WGs are of interest to me and my employer?
In the Specifications Group section of this site, you will see the Structure of the Technical Specification Groups (TSGs). Each of the four TSGs is made up of several Working Groups (WGs) which deal with specific parts of the TSG's work.
All of the important information and documents relating to each TSG or WG can be found via the homepage for that group.
3GPP Intro, Basics, Meetings, Rules, Following the work, Preparing meetings, Organizing and chairing meetings, Work Plan, Work items, WID improvement, Spec numbering, Drafting specs, Change Requests, Chairman's Role, Elections, Voting, Electronic meetings, Funding, Legal aspects.
Representatives of Market Representation Partners.
Precise details are given in the 3GPP Working Procedures.
Delegates must register - in advance of the meeting - their intention to participate. Regitration is on-line, using the URL given in the meeting invitation or via the link shown against the meeting on the portal (Meetings tab) or web site meeting page (e.g. for RAN1). Ensure you register under the correct company or other organization. If this is your first 3GPP meeting and your are unknown to our database, you will have to follow the instructions for creating a new "person" record. See below for how to proceed if you change employer or if your employer restructures its business. When you have successfully registered for a meeting, you will receive an automatic acknowledgment email. Keep this safe! - you will need to refer to it for confirming your presence at the meeting. This email also contains a hyperlink to enable you to print your meeting badge: you are responsible for printing that badge, and you must wear it throughout the meeting. At the meeting venue, the host will provide a limited number of badge holders, but you are encouraged to retain your badge holder and to re-use it for each 3GPP meeting you attend.
When you are at the meeting, wear your badge throughout the meeting, and once the meeting has started (and before it finishes), you must "check in" to confirm your presence. Instructions for how to check-in on line are given in the registration acknowlegment email (which is why you must keep that email safe!).
Occasionally - for example, at ad hoc meetings which, exceptionally, are not supported by MCC, or at venues where it is technically impossible for MCC to install a local meeting server - it will be necessary to check in by signing against your name on a paper attendance sheet; in this case, it is your signature which confirms your presence.
If you do not check in at the meeting, the organization you represent may lose voting rights.
at venues where several groups are holding parallel meetings, do not check in for meetings other than those in which you actually participate.
If you have forgotten to register in advance, all is not lost: register straight away and receive your check-in token and badge URL. You remain responsible for printing - and wearing - your badge. Unless you have registered, you will not be able to check in, and your organization may lose voting rights.
Note that registering for the meeting is quite independent of booking hotel accommodation!
When you register for a meeting, you will have to identify yourself, either by your ETSI On-Line account coordinates or by your name and email address. If you have recently changed employer, or have a new email address, DO NOT CREATE A NEW PERSON RECORD during the registration process, but follow the link to update your existing record first.
By default, you will be registered as representing your employer at the meeting, as long as that employer is a 3GPP Individual Member organization. If you wish to represent any other organization, select it from the appropriate list. When representing an organization other than your employer, at the moment you confirm your registration, an email will be automatically sent to both the TSG/WG Secretary and the official contact person of the represented organization informing them of the fact.
If you wish to represent an Individual Member other than your employer, do not create a new Person record in our database. Use your existing record, but select the appropriate "represented organization" from the pull-down list as described above.
Participation in TSG and WG meetings is recorded by the Support Team based on on-line check-in (or, exceptionally, signatures on the participants list). An Individual Member organization's right to vote in a particular group (TSG or WG) depends on its delegates' participating - and being recorded as participating - in meetings of that group. The official participation record appears in the secretary's report of the meeting, and the Individual Member organization you represent will acquire / maintain the right to vote at that meeting.
If you (or a colleague from the same organization) does not attend a group for three "ordinary" meetings, the IM will lose the right to vote at subsequent meetings. Find more information on voting rights here (especially slide 18 ff).
If you do not sign check in, you will be deemed not to have participated in the meeting! Note that you will not be able to check in on-line after the meeting has finished.
Each TSG has a Chairman and up to three Vice-Chairmen who are from member organizations, and a secretary from the 3GPP support team. The arrangements for WGs are similar, but WGs may have a maximum of two Vice-Chairmen. Contact details of the officials can be obtained from the homepage of the individual TSG or WG (e.g. for SA4).
See the Elections section of the site for details of the imminent elections and recent results.
For more information on the election of officials; see the 3GPP Working Procedures.
At the start of every meeting, the chairman shall read out a statement concerning declaration of Intellectual Property and a statement concerning compliance with antitrust (compatition) law. He shall also mention the conditions of LAN and internet fair usage usage (cited below).
If you change employer, let MCC know (mailto:3gppMembership@etsi.org) and we wll update your records. If you change any other parameters of your Person record, e.g. your contact coordinates, you should immediately take steps to update your Person record held by 3GPP. If you have an ETSI-On-Line (EOL) account, you should update your own coordinates by visiting this page and correcting your own record. If your email address has changed, you should take particular care to tick the check box to force all exploder lists managed by 3GPP to be updated to reflect that new address. If you do not have an EOL account, you should send an email to 3GPP Contact with full details of your new coordinates, and MCC will update the record for you. However, if you change employer, your old EOL account will no longer be valid, and you should email us with full details of your new employer. We will issue a new EOL account and cancel the previous one.
When a company restructures, or is involved in a take-over or merger, the company may itself inform the appropriate OP(s) of the change and in due course the OPs will inform the 3GPP Support Team. In this case, we will make appropriate changes to all affected employees of the organizations concerned, and delegates need take no explicit action (other than to check that their new coordinates are correctly recorded).
If you change employer, you are of course no longer eligible to represent the old employer, unless it is within the same group of companies. If the new employer is a 3GPP Individual Member (or OP, MRP, etc) you are immediately able to attend meetings representing that new organization. If a member organization restructures itself, its delegates may find that they are no longer employed by their original organization. However, changes in 3GPP membership normally occur rather later, and the original memberships will persist for some time. Until the new structure becomes reflected in the 3GPP membership, you may continue to attend meetings representing your former organization.
If you are the official contact person of a member organization, you can remove employees when they leave your organization by visiting https://portal.etsi.org/webapp/teldir/ListPers.asp. You will have to log in with your EoL account. Alternatively, you can notify MCC (mailto:3gppMembership@etsi.org). Unless you take this action, or the employee himself tells us he has left your organization, the ex-employee will retain his identity as an employee and can continue to act in that capacity if he so wishes.
It is often difficult for a company, especially a new member, to decide which 3GPP Groups to attend in order to be most effective in contributing to the work and to incorporating their ideas into the latest Release of specifications. This is particularly so for smaller organizations which may not have the resources to send a large enough number of delegates to cover all Groups. In order to make a sensible selection, you should review the Terns Of Reference of each Technical Specifications Group, and each Working Group, and look at the Work items and Specifications that each is responsible for. There is a structural map on the Specification Groups home page. Use the main menu item "Specification Groups" to select each Group of interest in turn. Each Group's page gives the latest Terms of Reference of that group, and in a table lower down you can link to lists of active Work Items and of active Specifications. You may also find the page listing the Specification series of interest.
MCC can give you further information or guidance if need be.
Each TSG or WG has a specific documents area allocated on the 3GPP ftp server. This is where you will find the all meeting documents including invitations, agenda, reports, contributions (TDocs) relating to that group. Delegates are advised to download and read all documents prior to the meeting. This will avoid saturating the meeting network during the first minutes at the start of the meeting.
During the meeting, new documents are made avaiable on the local meeting server in the Inbox folder pertaining to the group in question. The secretary may copy them to the main public server from time to time during the meeting if time permits. After the end of the meeting, the secretary will ensure that the public server is brought up to date with all documents created during the meeting.
Downloading meeting documents individually using HTTP is very time-consuming, and delegates are strongly encouraged to use FTP. Some organizations configure employees' PCs to inhibit the use of FTP: delegates may wish to ask their IT department to relax this restriction to enable more efficient meeting participation. Bear in mind that some meetings deal with over a thousand TDocs.
Archeological note: Written contributions are referred to as TDocs (or tdocs). This is an abbreviation of "temporary document" and in the long-ago (pre-3GPP) era of all-paper meetings, signified that such documents' lifespan was limited to the meeting at which they were presented. Following the meeting, TDocs were destroyed. If any information presented in a TDoc was to have continuing validity afterwards, it had to be captured in a "permenant document" or in the meeting report. For this reason, it was not legitimate for a publishable deliverable (TS or TR in 3GPP context) to use a TDoc as a reference. 3GPP has always operated 100% electronic (0% paper) as far as contribution documents are concerned. Documents are not deleted following the meeting, but are retained on the public server indefinitely. Neverthess, the term "TDoc" persists. But 3GPP has no concept of "permanent documents".
Any 3GPP Individual Member or OP or MRP may make a contribution to a 3GPP meeting. Each meeting invitation will contain details of how to register and provide contributions for that meeting. See the Meetings pages of the web site or, more usefully, the Meetings tab of the 3GPP Portal for more details. All bona fide 3GPP delegates will be issued with an ETSI-On-Line (EOL) account, and we will notify you of your username and your password. You should use these credentials when registering for a meeting (see above) and you must log in on the 3GPP Portal to perform certain operations, in particular, reserving a TDoc number.
Organizations which have been granted temporary Guest or Observer status are not allowed to make technical contributions.
Organizations which are not Individual Members of 3GPP (or are not OPs or MRPs) must not appear as the "source" of a technical contribution other than those classified as as Liaison Statements. There is no restriction on organizations with which 3GPP may exchange Liaison Statements other than outgoing LSs to the ITU, as identified in the 3GPP Working Procedures.
You should familiarize yourself with the user instructions for the portal, and take great care to select the correct TDoc type when reserving a number.
Most 3GPP meetings are held in countries / regions in which 3GPP Individual Members are based (Europe, North America, Asia.) Meeting locations tend to reflect the geographical diversity of the TSG and WG participants. Meetings may occasionally be hosted outside these regions by agreement of the delegates and, if necessary, the PCG.
Invitations for 3GPP meetings supplying the necessary logistical information are to be distributed by the host at least 21 days in advance, to the TSG or WG membership via the appropriate email exploder, and also posted on the 3GPP website.
You may consult the meetings page for individual TSG or WGs or the Meetings tab of the 3GPP Portal where you will find the archives of past meetings, and information relating to any future meetings for that group.
Each TSG or WG meeting has a structured numbering scheme for its documents. Delegates wishing to make contributions must first obtain a document number via the 3GPP Portal.
Note that the obsolete Automatic Document Numbering (ADN) tool is no longer in use.
Use the skeleton documents provided (via the section above).
Follow the guidance of the on-line rapporteurs' tutorial.
Follow the drafting rules (all of them!) given in 3GPP TR 21.801.
Also follow the procedural rules given in the 3GPP Working Procedures and the TSG procedures in 3GPP TR 21.900.
Use common sense. If that fails, ask your group's Support Team Project Manager.
Delegates are reminded that they share the meeting IT resources with their fellow delegates. You should not abuse the service by using bandwidth-hogging applications such as movie downloads, streaming video, web-based gaming, etc during the meeting. Use the internet service in your hotel rooms for this!
Delegates must respect the law of the hosting country, and should not visit prohibited internet sites.
In cases of persistent abuse of the internet bandwidth, MCC may restrict individual's use of the service.
1. Users shall not use the network to engage in illegal activities. This includes activities such as copyright violation, hacking, espionage or any other activity that may be prohibited by local laws.
2. Users shall not engage in non-work-related activities that consume excessive bandwidth or cause significant degradation of the performance of the network.
Since the network is a shared resource, users should exercise some basic etiquette when using the 3GPP network at a meeting. It is understood that high bandwidth applications such as downloading large files or video streaming might be required for business purposes, but delegates should be strongly discouraged from performing these activities for personal use. Downloading a movie or doing something in an interactive environment for personal use essentially wastes bandwidth that others need to make the meeting effective. The meeting chairman should remind end users that the network is a shared resource; the more one user grabs, the less there is for another. Email and its attachments already take up significant bandwidth (certain email programs are not very bandwidth efficient). In case of need the chair can ask the delegates to restrict IT usage to things that are essential for the meeting itself.
For many meatings, delegates are encouraged to provide feedback on their 3GPP meeting experience via a short web-based survey. The URL of the survey will be made known to participants.
Certain TSs contain formal SDL diagrams, MSC diagrams, and tests using TTCN. These require specialist tools to edit (see 3GPP TR 21.801 annex H.5 and annex I. These tools are expensive to purchase or license, so ETSI graciously makes a centralized instance of the tools available for the use of 3GPP delegates.
In order to use such tools, refer to the guideline document, then contact ETSI Helpdesk to obtain a personal account.
The facility for voting by proxy is described in the 3GPP Working Procedures, but the following tips will be useful for organizations wishing to use this technique at TSG or WG meetings. The process is identical for both elections and technical votes.
Consult the voting list established for the vote in question to ensure that your organization is entitled to vote by proxy.
You may request that the chosen person casts your vote in a particular way, but you have no way of checking whether he in fact did so!
There is a maximum number of proxy votes which a given individual can carry. This is laid down in the 3GPP Working Procedures. Check that your organization's vote will not violate that rule.
The letter authorizing the chosen person to vote on behalf of your organization must be drafted according to the pro forma available via the link on this page. The letter should be on your organization's letterhead (and not on the letterhead of the organization whose representative will actually cast the vote!).
has registered to represent the organization designated in the proxy letter.
Under exceptionsl circumstances, another person's signature may be acceptable, as long as the person is known (to MCC) to be a bona fide representative of the organization giving the proxy.
The signed proxy letter should be scanned and sent by email to MCC's Voting Coordinator and to the Sectetary of the TSG or WG in question (both identified on the MCC page on this site).
Prepare the proxy letter well in advance, bearing in mind all the steps above. Ideally, the signed letter should be with the Secretary at least one week in advance of the meeting at which the vote will take place. This ensures that MCC can validate it and catalogue it to ensure it is taken into consideration during the actual casting of the ballots.
2018-01-29: Additional info in Change of employer clause covering leaving employment. Update to the instructions for connecting to meeting server. New section giving guidance for for newcomers. (JMM).
2018-01-15: Fixed broken link to 3GPP presentation template (JMM).
2017-10-09: Section "Use of proxy votes" added (JMM).
2017-03-17: Meeting templates and links updated (JMM).
2016-10-18 & -19: General bringing up to date (JMM).
2015-10-20: New template for LSs (JMM).
2014-06-03: additional PowerPoint skeleton added, 16:9 aspect ratio (JMM).
2014-05-21: Hyperlink to 3GPP PowerPoint presentation updated (JMM).


text:
The Haunting of Bly Manor is a stunning tribute to the life-affirming power of horror stories
By Matthew Jackson
Credit: Netflix
To love someone is to be afraid.
Of course, if we're lucky, it doesn't feel like that most of the time. If we're lucky, the fear is an accenting flavor enriching the joy, only there in hints and flashes when we lock our doors at night or listen for the steady breathing of the person lying next to us. We accept as part of the messy bargain of human emotions that if we dare to love, the icy fingers of fear will always be reaching out because fear and love are dark siblings that know no other way. So we take the bargain, wrap ourselves in love, and hope that fear's reach is, for the most part, just a bit too short. If we're lucky, fear may brush against us from time to time, but it never truly takes hold for long.
Until, of course, it inevitably does, and then we have to ask ourselves the unavoidable question: Was the love worth the fear?
The Haunting of Bly Manor comes to us at a time when love and fear are waltzing unusually close together, at a time when they seem perhaps a little less like siblings and more like one awful, asymmetric shape. Creator Mike Flanagan and the cast and crew didn't intend this, of course, and couldn't have known the state the world would be in when their series premiered, but that doesn't dull the impact. Those of us who retreat into scary stories for escape and even comfort know that simulated, fictionalized fear can be a great inoculator, can help us work through our own internalized traumas and anxieties, and can even give us catharsis where the real world denied it. But a story like Bly Manor, so rooted in the eternal dance of love and fear in our hearts and minds, can do something even more than that. It can remind us that, while love cannot exist without fear, the propulsive power of love will always outstrip the intense pull of the gravity well of fear.
**Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers for The Haunting of Bly Manor below.**
Bly Manor takes the form of a Gothic Romance obsessed with love and longing in all its forms, and thus obsessed with the dance between love and fear. Throughout the series, in tightly focused individual episodes and in overarching narratives that run its entire length, we see the many forms love can take, both toxic and nourishing, the ways in which those different forms intertwine, and the ways in which they all interact with the fear that engulfs the manor and everyone within it.
In the early episodes of the series, as Dani (Victoria Pedretti) gets to know Bly's residents both living and dead, we see love in its darker forms, dancing so closely with fear that the two emotions are often indistinguishable. Henry Wingrave (Henry Thomas) is afraid to return to Bly and confront the love he still bears for his late sister-in-law and the love he could bear for his daughter, Flora (Amelie Bea Smith), so he sends Dani to care for the children instead. Dani, we later learn, is eager to escape to Bly because she's still running from her own tangle of love and fear, rooted in both the loss of a man she truly loved in some way and, more importantly, her fear of embracing the kind of love she really wants. In the early episodes, it is Dani's fear we feel most acutely because she has found that she is not only afraid of loving out in the open, but afraid of the kind of closeted love she'd previously settled for because it got her lifelong friend and fiance killed.
Dani's fear, and by extension Henry's, then merges with the fear-driven, toxic love story of Peter Quint (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and Rebecca Jessel (Tahirah Sharif), the ghosts that roam Bly closest to the surface of Dani's reality upon arriving. Dani learns through Hannah that Peter was apparently always someone to be feared, always someone with a self-interested, malignant agenda looming over the household, and indeed, as we later learn, that persisted in him even after his death. In the episode that lays out his motivations, Peter's life is revealed as one driven by fear and the hatred that grew from an ever-present sense of inadequacy in his life.
Credit: Eike Schroter/Netflix
Like other ghosts on the grounds who we'll later visit, Peter's fear becomes a kind of gravity well, a blight on the house that consumes Rebecca along with Peter himself. Peter's fear is a vicious, misogynistic disease that tells him the only way to ever truly be happy is to take what he wants, and it allows him to exploit Rebeca's own fear of losing him, rooted in her love for his bewitching darkness that verges just enough on vulnerability that she can't see she's being pulled down until it's too late. Even after that, the dance of love and fear that consumed Peter and Rebecca threatens to consume Miles and Flora, as Peter works to convince his beloved that the only way to defeat their fear of ceasing to exist is to steal someone else's existence.
Peter and Rebecca's doomed love story is, of course, a centerpiece of Bly Manor, but it's not the ultimate example of overpowering fear masquerading as relentless love. For that, we have to wait until Episode 8, when Lady Viola Willoughby's story unfolds. Lady Viola is, the story tells us, born into a world that tells her she is not meant to get what she wants, especially when what she wants is to preside over her family's manor for the rest of her life. So, in an effort to circumvent the system she's born into, Viola weaponizes love, devotes herself to the romantic ideals of her time, and gets what she wants, and more.
Viola's attempt to manipulate the patriarchal world she lives in actually gets her more than control of Bly. It gets her a husband and a daughter who she truly loves, but with that love comes compounded fear. Viola is no longer just afraid of losing Bly, but afraid of losing her family, and when an illness takes hold of her that seems designed to strip her of both, fear creeps in and snares her in its icy grip. It is from this fear — fear that seems to reaffirm itself every time she locks eyes with her sister — that the "gravity well" that is Viola Willoughby begins to form, and that gravity well forms the blight that will rule over Bly and its residents for centuries. Lady Viola's ghost, robbed of her identity but persistent in her will to take what's hers even if she doesn't remember what that is anymore, is the ultimate avatar for fear poisoning love.
And yet, even as she stalks the grounds of Bly, love persists, and the longer Dani stays at the manor, the more she becomes aware that love has taken root even amid all the fear and loss. She sees it in the way Flora and Miles press on, joyful in the moments when they're free of the darkness surrounding them. And they are patient and even sacrificial in the moments when that darkness takes hold, protecting Dani from it as long as they can and even allowing Peter and Rebecca in because, though Peter has lied to them, they truly believe they can help these people they once cared for. She sees it in Hannah and Owen, and the patient and often quiet way in which they fall in love with one another, a love that never gets to fully bloom but will nevertheless retain its beauty long after Hannah herself has faded. And of course, she sees it in Jamie, the gardener she feels like she knows before they've even spoken, who allows Dani to love and be loved as she truly is by uttering perhaps the most resonant words in the entire series:
"Humans are organic. It's a fact. We're meant to die. It's natural, beautiful, and it all breaks down and rises back up, and breaks down again, and every living thing grows out of every dying thing. We leave more life behind us to take our place."
One of Bly Manor's taglines, uttered by Flora in the series proper but echoed through the entire story, is "Dead doesn't mean gone." It is, depending on which point of the story you're in, a phrase that's equal parts hopeful and ominous. A ghost can be a remnant of trauma, but a ghost can also be a reminder of life. A ghost can be a vengeful echo of the past, but a ghost can also be a wish. Dead doesn't mean gone because the dead can become tactile avatars of fear that wrench the joy out of the room, but also because every living thing grows out of every dying thing.
These two threads of fear and love, stretching through the past and on into the future, interweave throughout Bly Manor in an intricate, primal, often heart-wrenching dance, and they culminate in Dani committing the ultimate act of love, breaking the gravity well by inviting Viola into her own body. After eight episodes of confronting fear, Dani makes the choice to literally absorb the ultimate avatar of terror on Bly Manor's grounds, so that at the very least, she can leave more life behind her in the form of Flora and Miles.
This beautiful, selfless act could be the series' final statement on the power of love over fear, and it would be a wonderful way to leave the tale. But Bly Manor does not stop there.
Fear does not vanish even after Dani has conquered her guilt, her fear of living her life honestly, and Lady Viola's haunting legacy. Fear goes on, even as the living thing that is Dani and Jamie's love story grows out of the dying thing that is Viola's gravity well. Dani carries that fear with her, shrinking from mirrors and fearful of the day when it will be too much, until the day she dies, but the fear does not stop her. The fear does not win. Even in her final moments, leaving Jamie to take her place as Bly's new Lady of the Lake, Dani does it not out of selfish abandonment, but out of a desperate, tireless desire to protect the woman she loves. Even then, even after years of living her life with a literal specter of fear dwelling inside her, Dani's last act is one of love, to preserve not just Jamie but the new life they helped grow by saving the children of Bly.
To love someone is to be afraid. Afraid that you'll lose them, afraid that you'll hurt them, afraid that you'll wake up one day and there will be a void where a part of you that seemed to exist outside of your own body used to be. Horror stories take that fear and, when they're at their best, use it to generate a profound and unshakeable sense of empathy. Horror stories have the power to make us confront the things we fear the most in a powerful, tangible way, and come out the other side feeling braver for having seen a way through. Horror stories, in other words, have the power to make us remember that the fear isn't going to win.
The Haunting of Bly Manor is a stunning tribute to the life-affirming power of horror stories, to their ability to remind us that fear does not exist without having something worth fearing for, and that even the most persistent fears are often worth carrying with you down through the years, because the love that dances alongside that fear, brighter and fiercer and faster, is worth it.
Because dead doesn't mean gone.
The Sandman's most terrifying nightmare getting own comic
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl