Re: [77attendees] Ad hoc meetings (Was: Re: Bar BoF: ip traceback)

I am actually quite concerned by the number of Bar BoFs.
At IETF meetings, ADs have way too much to do.  When I hear reports that 
in order to fit folks in, ADs are having to schedule in 15 minute 
increments, and getting less than 4 hours sleep a night, I start trying 
to figure out what we are doing wrong.

informal discussions among people interested in a topic, for the purpose 
of figuring out a problem, and whether they want to work on it, is 
clearly very useful.  But we seem to be on a trend with two components
Far more BarBofs &
Quasi-formality of BarBofs.

This quickly leads to an impossible load even on attendees, much less 
leadership.  If what BarBofs are doing is such that ADs are a 
significant help, we need to manage this so as not to burn our ADs out 
from both ends at once.  (We as a community do expect that ADs will help 
new folks bring work to the IETF, since our community is hard to 
navigate.  But this seems to be getting out of hand.)

Yours,
Joel
Who skipped all the BarBofs in the interest of his own sanity.

Carsten Bormann wrote:
> On Mar 26, 2010, at 04:01, Scott Brim wrote:
> 
>> distinguish between a "hash out ideas"
>> session and a "gather support" session.
> 
> +1.
> Even though that may not actually be the most important distinction.
> There are just different kinds of meetings, and some do benefit from a meeting room.
> 
> The 6lowapp "bar BOF" in Stockholm worked pretty well in spite of violating Lars' document in a number of ways, because
> 
> -- the large number of (active) attendees was indicative of the amount of support
>    -- yes, we even had "the equivalent of blue sheets"
> -- we had ~ 5 slides to pre-structure the discussion (well, Keynote, not Powerpoint :-)
> -- we *had* a discussion, with a tangible result (a five-item structure of the subject)
> -- we had a number of ADs there who further shaped the discussion (thank you ** 4)
> -- we kept it short (~ 1 h)
> -- we had a ~ round table and did not use microphones
> -- we had beer :-)
> 
> Of course, after that meeting, we had a lot of bar and hallway meetings for the "now let's make all that more precise" phase, too.
> 
> Gruesse, Carsten
> 
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