Re: Interim meetings - changing the way we work

[Benoit Claise <[e-mail]>]

Philip,
> Is there really a demand for interim meetings that cannot be supported 
> in IETF regular meetings? We meet 3 times a year, why isn't that 
> enough? I don't know of any W3C working group meeting more than three 
> times a year.
>
> Rather than trying to pile requirements onto interim meetings, can we 
> work out a way to accommodate these needs in regular meetings?
>
>
> I would like to suggest we go a stage further and change the way the 
> IETF meetings work.
>
> People are having interim meetings because a one or two day meeting on 
> one topic is a lot more productive than an IETF WG session.
Or because weekly meetings are more efficient.

Regards, Benoit
> For certain types of work and at certain stages, a concentrated 
> meeting is the only productive approach.
>
> W3C has always taken this approach, they have one annual meeting and a 
> series of interims. The annual meetings are structured like an 
> academic conference with a plenary track and a series of breakout 
> tracks on one topic.
>
>
> Now we can't and should not change every IETF meeting structure 
> because a lot of IETF work is not of the type that benefits from this 
> mode of work and those that do do not necessarily benefit all the time.
>
> But we could arrange one IETF on the W3C format as an experiment.
>
> There are pros and cos to both ways of working. I don't see that we 
> have to limit ourselves just to one approach.
>
>
> Early in a WG lifecycle I just want to spend two days doing nothing 
> apart from working through the issues list and kill off all the bike 
> shed issues. Later on when getting close to completion you might want 
> to have another bootcamp to close off all the open issues. In between 
> you probably want more of an update.