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

[Alexander Pelov <[e-mail]>]

Dear all,

I find that all the topics and the mails quite interesting, well-thought
and informative. In addition, I find the proposed IETF Policy to be
reasonable and a good start.

There are three topics that seem to get mixed:
1) Do we cancel the on-site IETF 107 Meeting?
2) Do we transform it into an all-virtual meeting?
   2.1) Pros-and-cons of virtual meetings
   2.2) Logistics of organizing a fully virtual IETF meeting
   2.3) Do we accept a "degraded virtual IETF 107" ?
3) Generalizing the current situation (e.g. have all future IETF meetings
remote, etc. etc.)

2.1) and 3) can be addressed later - let's not boil the ocean.

We need to consider 1) seriously - and it is an event we cannot control,
nor quantify correctly. (I've witnessed this first-hand having been forced
to cancel two business trips a week before the event (one of which was
MWC)).

I think that we should consider either:
A) preparing a full operational plan for all-virtual meeting or
B) being ready to cancel IETF 107.

A) doesn't need to be a perfect plan. However, if we do not have A), we
should be ready to accept that B) can happen.

The question can then be simplified to:
*How much time would it take to put in place a workable plan to have
all-virtual IETF 107?*
If it would take 7 days, then we have until March 13th to react to 1). If
it would take 1 month, it's already too late.

In both cases, there is a cut-off date for cancellation decision, and I'd
love to know when that date would be.
One thing about the logistics of a fully virtual IETF meeting is to have
the right communication tools, and I'd add WG chair & AD preparation. (I'd
expect things to work smoothly, but I don't like discovering surprises on
the day of the meeting). Also, Hackathon preparation (or cancellation ?)

My 0.02€

Cheers,
Alexander



On Thu, Feb 27, 2020 at 11:01 AM Vittorio Bertola <vittorio.bertola=
[e-mail]> wrote:

>
> Il 27/02/2020 08:33 Roni Even (A) <[e-mail]> ha scritto:
>
>
> Hi,
>
> I participated in tsvwg virtual meeting last week that had about 30
> participants using IETF webex.. If this is a demonstration of holding a
> virtual meeting in my view we are not ready. I kept losing the audio of the
> meeting and I was not alone, others complained in the chat window. The
> suggestion  was to use a PSTN connection to the meeting and not the IP one.
> This mean that I will have to pay for international call since there was no
> local free call in number.  Note that it was an audio only plus data, no
> video.
>
> As ICANN (who has decided to go fully online) is discovering, even if you
> solved the infrastructural problem (which they apparently plan to solve by
> using Zoom), there are many problems in running a purely virtual meeting,
> in addition to the basic ones of missing all the informal interaction,
> which is usually key to getting the hardest issues solved, and of crippling
> the emotional and non-verbal communication, which leads much more easily to
> confrontation.
>
> For example, the timezone problem: no matter which timezone you are in,
> there will be people for which the meeting will be out of working hours,
> often during the night. While your employer and your family will accept to
> "lose" you for a week if you go physically elsewhere, it is much harder to
> get that accepted if you are home - they will easily still expect you to be
> available during the day at least for important stuff. As a minimum, your
> attention will be partly diverted and your physical state will be hampered,
> and as a maximum, you will miss good chunks of the meeting. In some cases,
> working at night would even be incompatible with local labour laws.
>
> Or the connectivity problem: possibly this is stronger for ICANN, which
> has a significant share of participants from parts of the world where
> connectivity is worse, but not everyone has broadband connectivity readily
> available; actually, many African participants told ICANN that they do not
> have any connectivity at home, and they only connect from an office which
> will be closed during the daytime of the timezone of the meeting. And if
> they have connectivity, e.g. through mobile networks, it's often
> prohibitively expensive for day-long connections. Actually, if you end up
> having to use good old telephone calls, it will often be prohibitively
> expensive even in the "developed" world; and while travel is even more
> expensive, funding for travel is often available in ways that funding for
> (personal) connectivity is not.
>
> More generally, people with worse connectivity will have harder times in
> understanding others (especially if English is not their mother tongue),
> being given the floor, making their points, gaining support for them etc
> (though some careful chairmanship could partly address this).
>
> I'm not saying that these problems cannot be addressed, but it's important
> to consider them; it's false that meeting online always increases
> opportunities for participation, it just creates a different set of
> problems and of disadvantaged people.
>
> P.S. Now for the less topical part - sorry but I have to say this:
>
> > Il 26/02/2020 02:00 Casey Farrell <[e-mail]> ha
> scritto:
> >
> >
> https://www.yahoo.com/news/san-franciscos-mayor-declared-state-225239441.html
>
> It's nice to see that politicians overreacting and spreading panic
> globally just to show their local voters that they "do something about it"
> are not a prerogative of Italy only!
>
> --
>
> Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
> [e-mail]
> Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy
>
>