Re: [73attendees] Meeting lengths and locations (was: Re: Attendance by country)

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Friday, 05 December, 2008 13:35 -0500 Phillip Hallam-Baker
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> I think I agree with most if not all of what John said.

Then, given you comments below, I may not have been clear about
a large part of what I was suggesting.

> I think that working groups need to meet more than once a
> year. But that does not mean that the entire IETF needs to
> meet twice a year. I do like the practice of plenary meetings,
> in fact it is going to be one of my recomendations that OASIS
> moves to at least one plenary meeting a year.
> 
> But do we need three 1500+ person meetings each year? Do we
> need the IESG and the IAB to be in attendance?
> 
> Two IETF meetings a year would allow active working groups to
> hold as many as four meetings a year, two at main meetings and
> two ad-hocs. The ad-hocs can be organized for the convenience
> of the participants for that meeting. They can be two or even
> three day meetings if required. Less active groups that are in
> maintenance mode can have zero.

What I'm suggesting is that we should start, at least as a null
hypothesis, with the assumptions that:

	(1) The IETF doesn't need to meet more than twice a year.
	
	(2) That number is sufficient for groups that are
	actually getting work done to meet and get it done and
	for the sort of consensus-forcing that Dean and others
	have mentioned to occur _if_ other things are going well.
	
	(3) That WGs generally do not need to meet F2F more than
	twice a year, that we should be questioning a WG that
	needs more than six or seven meetings in a two year
	period very intensely and either holding them to a very
	tight schedule or trying to rearrange how they are
	managed and doing work.   For example, I'd consider a WG
	that started up, held the four meetings you are assuming
	for two consecutive years and, within that period,
	finished all its work and shut down to be tolerable.
	I'd think it was especially tolerable if the last two of
	those meetings were post-last-call issue resolution
	meetings, i.e., all of the documents were in Last Call
	within 18 months of chartering.  A longer or more
	intense schedule would imply to me that the WG isn't
	working in an IETF style and I'd start worrying that it
	wasn't going to be open enough to serious input from
	those who were not active members of the "WG Club" (note
	that a large number of F2F meetings can be easily used
	to exclude people who are interested, have considerable
	relevant expertise, but who are not supported by
	organizations pushing the work).

	(4) Any proposal for a WG or Area interim meeting should
	have to overcome a presumption that such meetings are
	unnecessary and unhealthy for openness and cross-area
	review, presumably by defending the requirement to the
	IESG (or an occasional WG meeting) and the community
	(for more frequent WG meetings or an area meeting).

	(5) WGs that are making good progress may not need to
	meet at every IETF, although "making good progress but
	need to hammer out consensus on some small set of
	issues" is the best of reasons for meeting.  WGs that
	are not making good progress should be required to
	explain why meeting time would help and to explore why
	they can't make progress without the meeting time.  A
	failure of that explanation should be rewarded by the
	WG's being shut down, not more meeting slots.   And any
	area that has discovered that it can't hold all required
	meetings within set total time limits should be
	conducting reviews of how many WGs it actually needs and
	whether they are working efficiently, not asking for
	more meeting slots to be created

I doubt that is workable in exactly in that form (in particular,
I really don't think we can get down to two meetings a year),
especially without some serious transition efforts, but I think
our discussions would be much more helpful if they were based on
"why is the above not feasible?" and "what would need to be
changed from the above in order for IETF to continue to be (or
to again start being) effective?", rather than about "how do we
squeeze in more meeting time"?
 
> For the security area, a meeting on the Monday of RSA week in
> San Francisco would be a highly useful place for CFRG to meet
> with cryptographers and have a discussion as to the current
> state of crypto algorithm recommendations. Most of the people
> you would want are there anyway.

And it would be an even more effective mechanism than any
devised so far to get the active participants in the security
area out of touch with, and irrelevant to, the activities in
other Internet areas that security work is supposed to be
supporting.  It might even be effective in convincing people
that non-cryptographers were unimportant to the security area's
work.

    john





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