Re: Structure of IETF meeting weeks

[joel jaeggli <[e-mail]>]

On 4/19/17 08:02, Dave Crocker wrote:
> On 4/19/2017 7:53 AM, joel jaeggli wrote:
>> Time to meet and space work with your co-authors and collaborators is a
>> pretty important part of why IETF meetings have any value at all to me
>> as an individual contributor.
>
> If there is serious interest in having more unstructured time
> available, remove less-productive wg sessions and reconsider carefully
> each of the ewstablished 'extra-curricular' time slots that are
> scheduled -- my own favorite target is Bits-n-Bites -- for possible
> elimination.
>
> There is relatively little filtering on working group slot requests,
> and worse there's no real aid for working group chairs, to help them
> plan and manage sessions more effectively.
fwiw, slot requests are considerably earlier in the pipeline then agenda
formation.

As an AD I was relatively assiduous at working with my chairs to cancel
working group slots where the agenda/acitivity didn't justify meeting
(beyond the case of the empty agenda that's probably somewhat subjective).
> We periodically have public discussions about this latter issue and
> there are documents that say the right things. However chairs often
> have little experience with such 'project' management and few have --
> or should be expected to have -- natural talents in that arena.
>
> Professional project planning and management assistance for chairs,
> and careful vetting of wg progress as a filter for wg time requests,
> would produce fewer and shorter sessions and better use of time.
>
>
> d/