Re: [111attendees] Agenda pains

[Jonathan Morton <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, 2021-07-29 at 13:23 +0000, Maisonneuve, Julien (Nokia -
FR/Paris-Saclay) wrote:
> Thinking out loud : why not make the "local" agenda option the
> default ? Refreshing the agenda (to get the new WG agendas and
> materials) would not require returning to the page's top to resync to
> local.
> I would assume most people use their local set timezone, so it could
> be positive for a significant majority.

Defaulting to the timezone of the meeting locality makes sense for an
in-person meeting, since most attendees interested in any given session
will be in the same timezone as the physical session room.  For the
same reason, having the first session of the day start *not* first
thing in the morning local time usually makes sense.

Defaulting to the timezone of the accessing browser makes sense for a
virtual meeting, since almost all attendees interested in any given
session want to know how to fit the session attendance into their daily
routine.  This is, of course, the situation we presently face.

The most vexing aspect of the current agenda layout is that the
timezone of each quoted session time is not stated adjacent to the time
itself, only in the header which is generally quite a long way from any
of the times being looked for.  This makes it disturbingly easy to
misinterpret the times, whatever zone they are in.

I would support a change to show both meeting-local and browser-local
times (if different), with the timezone of each quoted directly
alongside the times.  Eg. 12:00-13:00 PDT, 22:00-23:00 EEST.  If space
permits, quoting the UTC time as well would be useful in some contexts
(eg. coordinating multi-zone groups of colleagues).

For those cases where timezone differences result in a change of date,
ambiguity could be eliminated by quoting it as (+1d) instead of just
(+1), or by directly quoting the actual day-of-week in brackets.

 - Jonathan Morton