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

Hello,

This was my first in person IETF meeting and while I enjoyed meeting people in person in the hallway and put a face on names I see on the mailing lists, I think the « official agenda » part of the meeting would have been a better experience online than onsite:

- the chat is not available on the mobile site for meetecho and lots of discussions occur there. « Oh it is discussed in the chat » is frustrating when you are in the room.

- often we couldn’t see the face of people talking remotely

- in many WG meetings, I had the impression to attend reporting that could have been an email while actual technical discussions on items of the WG were pushed to the mailing list for the sake of a lack of time.

The last point might be the one that puzzles me the most. What is the point meeting in person to push discussions on online tools ? And why do we need to have WG activity reporting as slides rather than an email ?

My 2 cents,

________________________________

Antoine FRESSANCOURT
Email: antoine.fressancourt@huawei.com<mailto:antoine.fressancourt@huawei.com>

From: Leif Johansson<leifj@sunet.se<mailto:leifj@sunet.se>>
To: 113attendees<113attendees@ietf.org<mailto:113attendees@ietf.org>>
Subject: [113attendees] hybrid meetings: the worst of both worlds
Time: 2022-03-25 14:36:43

I spent the week onsite in Wienna...

As usual the arrangements are great and the local host made this a very nice experience.

And then there is the hybrid meeting thing... imo hybrid works well as technology and completely sucks on a human level.

This statement may be controversial and/or unpopular in the IETF where we're all about the tech but...

- hybrid means there is not enough folks onsite to create critical mass for the "hallway track"
- remote-participation is arguably better for the technical WG process than onsite at this point
- remote is really bad for the informal discussions (gather is very disappointing imo)

The most efficient WG were where most of the contributurs had decided to show up onsite.

The most important discussions I had were (as usual) not in a WG meeting.

Maybe the IETF needs to rehink the purpouse of onsite meetings.

We have made the remote experience so good that the "professionalized" aspect of churning out RFCs doesn't really need onsite.

However, an IETF with no human interaction might be professional but it won't be efficient.

        Cheers Leif

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