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

[Fred Baker <[e-mail]>]

On Feb 26, 2020, at 11:28 AM, Warren Kumari <[e-mail]> wrote:
> I've participated in a bunch of them, and have found them to be not
> very effective -- more effective than not meeting at all, but not by
> much.

On this point, I would agree.

As a ICANN Advisory Committee chair, I have been watching the ICANN process of developing a meeting, and I'm underwhelmed. Something that sees to drive it pretty hard is that some of the groups need translation, so every group has resolve translation questions. Each SO or AC comes in with a set of meetings it would like to have (for the RSSAC, that's four), and a number of other meetings that other folks would like it to have - which may or may not be important. "Could you please give us a report on your progress?" The opening question is "what do you *have* to do", which for us means that we have whittled a nine day meeting down to four hours, the rest of which was meetings of opportunity - "we're in the same place, could we talk?" Or "we need to have a community-wide XXX discussion". If anything, I have had confirmed my existing estimation of ICANN meetings, which is not high.

Attending IETF interims, what I tend to observe is that there is a presentation but often not much discussion. The value of an IETF meeting is, in my view, in the discussion. As others have noted, that discussion is often in the hallway, over a meal, or in a bar, and a remote meeting makes all of that close to impossible.

So I don't view "let's become completely virtual" as a realistic or viable destination. It's a reasonable plan B when we need one, but it's very much "plan B".

As to canceling this meeting, the best argument I can formulate for doing so is that we don't know much about COVID-19 and giving it no chance is conservative.

If the meeting is held, I plan to attend.