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

[Marshall Eubanks <[e-mail]>]

On Dec 5, 2008, at 1:01 PM, John C Klensin wrote:

> --On Thursday, 04 December, 2008 18:03 +0200 Roni Even
> <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I think that this list is very useful but the point that was
>> made before is that we need the time to do the work.
>
>> We can have a shorter meeting if we find a way to have all the
>> sessions and enough time for some ad-hoc meetings during the
>> IETF meeting to progress the work. As was pointed out some of
>> the mentioned standard groups work longer hours and spend
>> evening time on editing sessions (This is my experience from
>> ITU-T SG-16 and MPEG).
>
> I believe that you have just summarized the fundamental
> disconnect we are all having about this.  With ITU-SGs and many
> similar bodies, the expectation has historically been that most
> of the group work will get done at meetings.  Documents are sent
> out in advance of meetings so that people can better prepare for
> the meetings.  Email tends to serve much the same purpose, e.g.,
> gaining sufficient group understanding of the issues that people
> can come together at face to face meetings to resolve them.
>
> That approach has a number of strengths and weaknesses.  But it
> clearly has the implication that one needs large blocks of
> meeting time, not, e.g., one or two sessions of a couple of
> hours duration a few times a year.  If one adopts that model,
> then, as Keith pointed out in another note, shorter meetings in
> terms of days is going to imply more interim face to face and ad
> hoc sessions.  In the ITU's case, it has resulted in SG plenary
> sessions that last for weeks, not days.
>
> That, in turn, is often associated with a fundamental difference
> in  the people who attend meetings and the organizational
> relationships than send them.  While there are certainly
> exceptions, few companies consider it wise to regularly send
> someone with critical-path product design and implementation
> responsibility off to attend standards meetings whose duration
> is measured in weeks.  The situation for academics with teaching
> responsibilities or consulting firm principals is even worse.
>

There is a related issue : This will filter out small companies. Large
ones might be able to afford this, smaller ones will not. One of the  
things
that attracted me to the was the relative "flatness" of the  
organization; you
don't have to be with big company X to make a difference.

Regards
Marshall

> With so much time spent in meetings that people usually have to
> justify their jobs on the basis of their standards activities,
> there is also a tendency to be sure that workloads expand to
> fill up the time available and to make good trip reports.  There
> is little evidence that there is a positive correlation between
> that behavior and high-quality, useful, standards.
>
> By contrast, we've historically tried to optimize the IETF so
> that our primary way to get work done is on mailing lists and so
> that those who can make significant technical contributions but
> for whom extensive meeting attendance is hard or impossible can
> fully participate.  We should need face to face meetings only to
> raise the odds that people understand issues the same way at a
> high level and to argue about particular loose end issues in the
> hope of laying a foundation for resolution.  This broadens our
> base and keeps things more open and less a matter of company
> representation and balancing company positions and objectives.
> We have usually thought that was good.
>
> Marshall Rose's long-ago distinction between Do-ers and Go-ers
> doesn't quite capture all of the relationships and their
> consequences, but may be helpful in understanding both the
> attitudes and why they are important.
>
> I believe that, especially if we are facing a period in which
> times are tough and budgets restricted in the industry, "how can
> we get in more face to face meeting time" is the wrong question.
> Instead, I think we should be asking questions like:
>
> (1) If there are so many WGs in an area that having them all
> meet requires making IETF meetings longer, or requires regular
> interim meetings, what is wrong with that area, how its WG are
> organized, or the amount of work it is taking on?  Is all of
> that work really effective, or would some pruning and
> restructuring help?
>
> (2) If a given WG has evolved into a working mode in which
> extensive face to face meetings are needed, there is little
> progress between the three IETF meetings a year, and there is
> frequent demand for interims, what is wrong?  How can the group,
> or its work or leadership, be restructured to what we should
> consider a problem?  Would it be appropriate to export the work
> to another organization that works better in that mode?
>
> (3) How can we rethink the IETF to require less face time, not
> more?  Have Internet conferencing technologies advanced to the
> point that, with some preparation and changes to how we do
> things, we could do more than way and cut face time to two
> meetings a year instead of three (even if those meetings needed
> five full days, the cost savings to participants and participant
> organizations would be significant (any IAOC member who says "we
> couldn't do that because of the budget hit", rather than
> thinking about how to management it, should immediately resign
> -- we are, IMO, placing too large a burden on those who attend
> meetings anyway and reducing meetings and meeting planning time
> ought to have a significant impact on secretariat costs).
>
> To put that more extremely, if the IAOC treats WG or area
> complaints that "we need more meeting time" as an indication
> that should be made to happen, and the IESG goes along, and that
> takes us into cycles, not only of dropping attendance but of
> attendance that is increasingly dominated by a relatively small
> number of large organizations, then we might as well give it up.
> To take just two examples, ITU-T and ISO/IEC JTC1 actually have
> a lot of organizational advantages over the IETF (not least
> being long-term budget line items in many enterprises rather
> than having to try to squeeze resources out of engineering) and,
> if our work methods and attendance become indistinguishable from
> theirs, the organizations that pay the bills, and the industry
> in general, would probably be better served by eliminating the
> duplication and additional meetings.
>
>    john
>
>
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