Re: [108attendees] Successful IETF 108

[Christian Hopps <[e-mail]>]

> On Aug 3, 2020, at 10:17 PM, Bron Gondwana <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Aug 4, 2020, at 03:27, Les Ginsberg (ginsberg) wrote:
>> FWIW, perhaps we should rethink the traditional meeting agenda.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Today pretty much everyone does:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Present the slides I published 24 hours before the meeting
>> In the time left for my slot (little to none because agendas are usually full) entertain questions/discussion
>> 
>> 
>> Instead, don’t present slides at all (still prepare/publish them – and have them available if needed for reference). Each “presenter” gets 10-15 minutes to simply take questions/have discussion – the interactive things that have added value when done “face-to-face”.
>> 
>> This would use meeting time to do what cannot be done as easily “on the list”.
>> 
> 
> There's an assumption in here that the presenting of the slides doesn't have any benefit, which I don't believe is true.
> 
> As the presenter talks through the slides they are aligning the thoughts of everybody in the room (including themselves) and hence when we get to the conversation, everybody has the cache state loaded into their brain and the conversation can be productive.  I don't think that "read the slides in advance and come with questions" will give the same alignment.

I was trying to figure out why I thought this wouldn't work well, and I think you identified the most important aspect (cache loading and aligning thoughts).

A couple addition things that presenting the slides during the meeting accomplishes, I think,

1) It allows for pulling in some experts (and their viewpoints) who might make themselves available fully during meeting slots, but aren't really so involved in the WG that they read every draft or would watch videos of the slide presentations beforehand.

2) For work that the WG ultimately will reject, it gives the authors the feeling that they were fully heard prior to that rejection. I know that this should be able to be done strictly on the list; however, human nature what it is, it sometimes helps when people actually see that other people listened to them. This might still work if there was lively back and forth during a Q&A session, but I suspect for this type of work many people wouldn't watch the premade videos b/c they suspected it wouldn't move forward, and so there'd be much less participation during the Q&A part.

In LSR we've certainly had meetings where we didn't have enough time, but that was primarily after we merged IS-IS and OSPF and hadn't figured things out. Lately things have been OK I think, up until IETF 108. For IETF 108 we didn't have enough time to run things the way we normally do -- 100m was definitely not enough time for us. For the next virtual, if nothing changes with the format (single session 100m max), we will be have to more limit who gets agenda slots, perhaps with some "if there's time" slots tacked on the end in case discussion times are not fully used on earlier presentations.

Thanks,
Chris.

> I'm not saying "there's not better way", but it's worth considering the positives of the existing patterns and seeing how we can preserve them.
> 
> Bron
> 
> 
> --
>   Bron Gondwana, CEO, Fastmail Pty Ltd
>   [e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>
> 
> 
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