Re: [93attendees] [IAOC] Meeting schedule

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On Jul 21, 2015, at 9:55 AM, Henning Schulzrinne <[e-mail]> wrote:
> My experience differs - the working groups I have attended so far this week all made good use of their allocated time (and, in some cases, could have used a bit more). 

Hm.   Of the working groups I have attended, I’d say at least half of the working group time was wasted on long presentations about work that participants should already be familiar with.   Many of the comments, probably 50%, at the microphone did not reflect any serious thought on the part of the commenter, and did not add useful insight to the discussion.   I have seen some good discussions, but these have been in the minority.   I see a lot of working groups with packed agendas where each draft gets ten minutes.   It’s impossible to have a constructive discussion about a draft that needs discussion in ten minutes.   Ten minutes is way too long for a sales pitch about a draft.

I sympathize with your skepticism, but I haven’t seen a lot of effort to change the status quo.  What I am suggesting is that if we seriously just say “look, the hours we have for meetings are limited to business hours, and you have to figure out how you’re going to best use your limited time,” and divide the time up evenly between requestors, maybe with exceptions if they can be clearly justified, we will stop providing incentives for working group chairs to just ask for as much time as they can and not try to make good use of the time they get.

The reason we haven’t seen this work is because we haven’t tried it.   We haven’t really tried anything.   The only discipline that chairs have experienced in the past is as a result of schedule congestion, and in general the IESG just throws themselves on the scheduling sword and makes it work based on chairs’ requests.   I am proposing that we stop doing that.