Re: BoF's in the Age of Covids

[Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[e-mail]>]

FWIW,

On Tue, May 12, 2020 at 10:13 AM Michael Thomas <[e-mail]> wrote:

>
> On 5/12/20 1:15 AM, Michael Richardson wrote:
> > Michael Thomas <[e-mail]> wrote:
> >      > On 5/11/20 4:14 PM, Michael Richardson wrote:
> >      >> Michael Thomas <[e-mail]> wrote: > It's been my impression
> that a
> >      >> substantial amount of the work for > putting together BoF's, etc
> has
> >      >> been done loosely and informally > usually in the setting of a
> meeting
> >      >> and drinking beers with others (aka > bar BoF). Since we seem to
> be
> >      >> doing neither neither these days, from > what I can tell this
> list is
> >      >> the closest to that in purpose. Yet since > it's ietf-wide it
> includes
> >      >> lots of different areas and interests it's > easy to see how the
> >      >> signal to noise ratio might get bad in a
> >      >>
> >      >> I agree that [e-mail] is a good starting point, but I
> think one
> >      >> needs to take a bit of a shotgun to a half-dozen other MLs to let
> >      >> people know you are thinking of something.  [e-mail] is not
> >      >> universally read, alas.  Also making use of Any-of-Other-Business
> >      >> section of other virtual interims to talk briefly about things.
> I
> >      >> wouldn't be afraid of babbling about such things in the jabber,
> DURING
> >      >> (virtual) meetings, but also in hallway@
> >
> >      > You mean wg ml's? Often that is the *last* place I'd want to bring
> >      > something new up and from my experience the feeling is mutual :)
> >
> > I'm not suggesting trying to have the conversation there, but rather,
> that
> > it's an important place to find interested parties.  To be clear: it's
> for
> > the announcement.
>
>
> Yeah, that smells suspiciously of spam to my taste. You're trying to get
> the attention of the usual suspects, but the problem has little if
> anything to do with the wg's. The bulletin board in the lobby is a much
> more neutral place since it is passively rather than actively alerting.
> Maybe a per-area bar-bof-alert mailing list? nicer would be to be able
> to send out the idea and create a chat room for it which was reaped if
> it goes unused for some period of time.
>

In meat-space, this was what we intended the HotRFC sessions on Sunday
nights of IETF week to be.

We didn't have HotRFC for IETF 107, and no one complained because we were
thrilled we could actually get all the BOFs, area sessions, and first-time
working groups scheduled, but if we're not going to have a face-to-face
session in 2020 (does anyone think we are?), it may be worth asking the
Aaron Falks of the world to think about what they need to run HotRFC
virtually, really, and whether that could be done more frequently than
three times per year.

I note that "how important is HotRFC for IETF 108?" was on the meeting
survey a couple of weeks ago - perhaps we got some helpful thoughts there,
too.

Best,

Spencer


>
> The long and short of this is that for an org so bolted at the hip to
> e-conversations, it's going to be interesting to find all of the places
> that we're dependent to meat-space.
>
> Mike
>
>