Re: [113attendees] hybrid meetings: the worst of both worlds

[Henk Birkholz <[e-mail]>]

Hi Leif,

I am having a really hard time agreeing with your assessment. I was/am 
an onsite attendee. In the WGs I am involved in, this f2f meeting made 
excellent progress, key individuals where one part onsite and two parts 
remote (very subjective, unfounded, non-statistical feeling). And from 
my individual onsite attendee perspective, this was a great success.

I agree that the gather.twon experience was rather limited. Bob actually 
was in my ear one day suddenly (I was muted and gather was always on, 
but I forgot about that). Alas, I was just about to change locations, 
felt bad, and then forgot to come back to him (sorry, Bob!). That makes 
me feel that the "hallway track" experience between onsiters and 
remoters was probably very different.

That said, the "hallway track" feeling of "online IETFs" simply cannot 
be compared to the "f2f experience" it simply is not nearly as good. I 
am aware that a lot of effort went into designing the gather.town sites, 
the scavenger hunts, the "local" scenery, etc. But my side-meetings 
during online meetings where 90% in our "everyday online tools" and I 
did probably attend only 50% of the WGs that I would normally have (also 
due to dayjob and that virtual business trips are a fantasy of mine that 
do not really work out)

I got so much done this IETF onsite! It was amazing! In hindsight that 
is such a stark contrast to the visible, tangible, and really worrying 
decline in sparking new work that I experienced during the online IETF 
meetings. I was so happy to see that onsite... that problem simply went 
away! I would like to quote another (this time still remote) fellow 
IETF'ler here:

> I recall the feeling of strange euphoria that comes from the mix of exhaustion and hyper-communication

I experienced that feeling again, this week. And it is hard to put in 
words how much I was missing that as a human being. I know - looking at 
the numbers - this will not get easy soon. But I am absolutely certain 
about a few things:

* we need these f2f meetings and cannot give up on them
* the next IETF meetings will still be a challenge and the challenges 
will change as will the world around us - all the time
* the onsite crew that made this hybrid meeting possible met an 
impossible challenge with extraordinary creativity and patience and did 
an amazing job!

There is always room for improvement, but I cannot see an IETF with less 
then 3 meetings per year in the long term.

As Jan-Frederick pointed out... especially newcomers will have a really 
hard time integrating into our community - as we need them to! I'll 
accept the obvious fact that some meetings will again be remote in my 
life-time. But I definitely expect that to be the exception to the rule.

Viele Grüße,

Henk


On 25.03.22 15:36, Leif Johansson wrote:
> On 2022-03-25 15:17, Wes Hardaker wrote:
>> Hi Leif,
>>
>> Thanks for the comprehensive review.  I had some good and bad 
>> experiences both, but in general think it worked "better than I was 
>> expecting it to".
>>
>> One question, in order to figure out what a concrete suggestion I 
>> could take away from your notes:
>>
>>
>>     Maybe the IETF needs to rehink the purpouse of onsite meetings.
>>
>>
>> So in situations where most of the attendees can't attend in person 
>> due to global issues out of our control, are you suggesting we don't 
>> hold hybrid meetings?  What do you think would be a good ratio of 
>> in-person to remote attendance that should be the barrier for deciding 
>> whether or not to hold an on-site meeting?  [we've had remote 
>> participation for a long time of course, but the ratio was far lower]
>>
>> [note: I have no decision making ability in this area -- I'm just 
>> curious]
>> -- 
>> Wes Hardaker
>> USC/ISI
> 
> I'm suggesting that there might come a time (soon probably) where there 
> are no obstacles to travel
> but the technology is "good enough" for remote *execpt* for all the 
> reasons the IETF is more than
> a set of WGs...
> 
> At that point we should either give up on f2f entirely (and I think give 
> up on the IETF as something
> more than the I-Ds it produces) *OR* figure out another reason for 
> people to want to travel.
> 
>      Cheers Leif
>