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

John C Klensin <john+ietf@jck.com> Fri, 05 December 2008 18:02 UTC

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Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2008 13:01:49 -0500
From: John C Klensin <john+ietf@jck.com>
To: Roni Even <ron.even.tlv@gmail.com>, "'DRAGE, Keith \\(Keith\\)'" <drage@alcatel-lucent.com>, 'Phillip Hallam-Baker' <hallam@gmail.com>
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Subject: [73attendees] Meeting lengths and locations (was: Re: Attendance by country)
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--On Thursday, 04 December, 2008 18:03 +0200 Roni Even
<ron.even.tlv@gmail.com> 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.

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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