Re: [93attendees] Meeting schedule

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On Jul 21, 2015, at 6:16 AM, Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Let me disagree strongly. Saturday and Sunday are already full days for
> some people - writing code rather than going to meetings, in many cases.
> Sunday, Friday and Saturday are each unacceptable to some people for
> personal reasons; using Friday morning is a compromise. Many people would
> find taking more than 5 days out of the office impossible. I don't think
> that we can completely avoid late evenings.

Another option would be to make more efficient use of meeting time.   Still, after all these years, the presentation/discussion format assumes that nobody has read the drafts, and that nevertheless everything is qualified to speak at the mic.   Sales pitches are great, but should be brief; discussions should be among people who have read the documents.   And political discussions probably ought not to occur in working group meetings, because they just waste time.

I think that if we just said “the schedule will be four days, regular business hours only, with a half day on Friday ending at noon, and the plenary on Monday at 9,” and chunked sessions down to an hour each, we’d get a lot more value out of the meeting, because we could have fewer tracks, more meetings, and chairs and participants would have to be strategic about what presentations to allow and what form the presentations would take.   It always bugs me when I see a working group consuming six hours or more of agenda time.

This is partly motivated by a belief that what in-person meetings accomplish best is people who are doing real work talking face to face.   Most of the discussion that occurs at the mic is wasted time; most of the presentations are wasted time.  This is the source of the truism that most of the work at the IETF occurs during the breaks.   It would be nice if we could change that.

Speaking as someone who is currently missing his first IETF since Oslo, I’m asking myself whether I’m actually losing out.   The fact is that the most useful discussions I’ve participated in in this IETF have all been the jabber room; the presentations have been of minimal use, and the microphone discussions haven’t been particularly constructive.   This is not to say that they are _completely_ useless, just that they aren’t a particularly good use of the quite expensive f2f time we all generally have three times every year.