Re: Further update on COVID-19 (Coronavirus) and IETF 107 Vancouver

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

Hi, Michael,

On Wed, Feb 26, 2020 at 2:30 PM Michael Richardson <[e-mail]>
wrote:

>
> {Please clean the CC list, in particular, CC ietf-announce doesn't work}
>
> Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[e-mail]> wrote:
>     > Keeping in mind that none of us can speak for anyone else - I can
>     > certainly fly to Vancouver and see who else shows up to talk, and no
>     > one is going to make any of us show up against our will...
>
> The problem that many companies have is that they can't be seen to be
> making
> anyone go there against their will.  There are many subtle internal
> political
> situations which would question whether people are making their own
> decisions.
>
> So this is why, I think, companies are forbidding travel.  That decision
> invokes no subtle peer pressure, removes them from liability ("The company
> sent me"...) etc.
>

Understood. I got a full refund on my ticket to a meeting this week, after
telling AA "my meeting was cancelled due to COVID-19, and I can send
documentation if you need it" (they did not). Other people's mileage may
vary, of course ...


>     > I'm currently participating in an all-virtual meeting in another SDO,
>     > and their e-mail server is running about 20 minutes behind direct
> mail
>     > to participants, so nobody is quite sure what the current discussion
>     > state is, depending on whether or not you're addressed directly in
> the
>     > e-mail.
>
> hahaha.
>

This is an SDO that does lots of its work face-to-face, or by e-mail. They
knew to tell people "upload your contributions to the server, don't attach
them to e-mail", or it would have been even worse. I don't know what our
bottlenecks are, and I hope we don't find out in ways that prevent us from
getting anything done.

I'm hoping we have enough remote participants to learn how close we are to
scaling to all-remote, and have enough local participants that we can still
have an effective meeting. If nothing blows up in the next six weeks, Right
now, I think we may have both. The jury is still out.


>     > Canceling completely now is also an excellent way to find out that we
>     > are nowhere near able to go Plan B full-online successfully. If
> someone
>     > in this thread can speak authoritatively about how well prepared we
>     > are, I'd love to hear from them. Until we hear from them ...
>
> 1) Our problem is that meetecho requires a base to operate from.
>    A meeting room.  If we can accomodate that, then we can use it.
>

This is why I'm waiting for someone who has set up either the IETF meeting
network or the Meetecho control room to chime in - that's my understanding,
but I've never done either (so far).

Best,

Spencer


> 2) Webex officially does not support quite a number of desktop systems
> that are
>    important to us (although they do work, but they don't support us).
> Anyway,
>    we have no SLA with the webex "donation".
>    Webex does not seem to have an option to force people who join to join
>    muted, although the chair/host can mute people who can't figure it out
>    themselves.
>
> 3) Most of the other services which do run everywhere do not support larger
>    groups of people.
>
> {me: not crossing a border this time}
>
> --
> Michael Richardson <[e-mail]>, Sandelman Software Works
>  -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-
>