7 Following the group yourself, and what the record cannot tell you

7.1 Where to look, in what order

Nothing here is behind a paywall or a login. The whole of CT1's output sits in folders on a public server, and the useful skill is knowing which folder answers which question.

• The meeting folders hold the documents, the agendas and the reports, one folder per meeting ^[2].

• The mirror area is the folder the copy on this machine is pulled from ^[3].

• The specification status report is the page the catalogue of documents is built from ^[4].

• The list of office holders gives chair, vice chairs and secretary, term by term, which is the one place the group's history of leadership survives ^[5].

• The work plan is the list of work items every document points at ^[6].

• The document search ^[7] and the meeting calendar ^[8] are the two views these counts were taken from.

7.2 How fresh any of this is

The newest CT1 document on record was uploaded at 2026-07-31 10:40:59, and it is filed under C1-162 ^[9] — a meeting that has not started C1-162. 69 documents were already sitting there ^[10].

That is the normal state of the record: papers arrive for weeks before the meeting they belong to. It also means a document number alone tells you nothing about whether anything was decided.

157 of the 229 active CT1 specifications have parsed text on this machine ^[11], so a clause can be quoted from those and only those. TS 24.501 is one of them, which is why this course leans on it.

7.3 The twelve things this record does not hold

Everything below was checked rather than assumed. Each one is a sentence somebody will be tempted to write, and none of them can be written from here.

• Attendance, except for two meetings. 172 people at C1-161 and 165 at C1-160 come from the participant lists inside those two reports. No other meeting has a number, so there is no trend to describe.

• An approved report for the last meeting. C1-161's report is a draft ^[12]. Say "the draft report of C1-161" or say nothing.

• Anything from C1-162 onwards. Documents are being filed; the meeting has not happened. Never write that CT1 decided anything there.

• Past office holders by name. 44 terms exist in the file ^[13], but only the four current names are in the register ^[14]. No past chair may be named.

• Votes, objections or majorities. 3GPP works by consensus and the data holds no tallies of any kind. "Approved by a majority" is never a sentence this record supports.

• What any abbreviation stands for. The register holds titles and work-item names exactly as spelled — "AmbientIoT-CT", "MINT_Ph2". Anything a name stands for has to come from a specification's own text.

• The text of any letter between groups. The counts in Architecture and protocol — what stage 2 and stage 3 mean are counts of letters. What any of them said is not here.

• Agenda, minutes or debate. The record knows a document's outcome word — agreed, revised, postponed, noted, merged, withdrawn — and nothing about why. Never write why CT1 postponed something.

• Rapporteur, editor or author names. The specification catalogue carries number, type, title, group and an active flag, and no person.

• A reliable count before 2015. 7181 CT1 documents carry no upload date at all ^[1], so every yearly number is a count of dated rows while the all-time numbers include the undated ones.

• Any comparison with another working group. The register was built for CT1 alone. It holds no counts for CT3, CT4, SA2 or anybody else, so "the largest", "the busiest" and "the fastest" are all off the table.

• Dates or version numbers for the specifications themselves. Only the number, the title, and which Releases each one has a version in.

7.4 Reading a claim before you repeat it

Three questions catch nearly everything.

R1. Is it a count, and of what? Every count on this site carries the question that produced it and the day it was asked. A number without that is a number to leave alone.

R2. Is it about a meeting that has happened? The calendar mixes held and planned meetings in one list ^[8], and a planned one has documents but no outcomes.

R3. Is it in the document, or about the document? A timer value is in the document and can be quoted §10.2. Why the timer has that value is in a change request, and why the change request was written is usually in nobody's record at all.

7.5 Where to go next

The document itself is the best next step, and it is open beside every clause link in this course. Inside TS 24.501, the document at the centre is the map of it, §Annex F is its own account of how it got that way, and §10.2 is the page most arguments end on.

For the group rather than the document, the sources page of this course lists every register entry cited here, each with the exact question that produced it. Nothing on this site is asserted from memory, and that page is how you check.