Re: Updating BCP 10 -- NomCom ELEGIBILITY

[Melinda Shore <[e-mail]>]

On 2/12/15 7:40 PM, Russ Housley wrote:
> We disagree.  Many people tell us (on the IAOC surveys) that the most
> important thing that happens at IETF meetings is the hallway
> conversations.  It is a significant part of the culture.

I think there's a cultural thing at work - it appears to be increasingly
the case that IETF culture requires meetings and face-to-face
discussion.  There are companies that have telecommuting cultures and
in which it's possible to have "hallway" discussions online, and ones
in which remote work is not part of the culture and if there are
people offsite they're remembered as an afterthought, if at all.  I've
been irritated recently by the extent to which we've moved away from
being an organization that makes useful things towards one which
publishes requirements documents and problem statements and which
sinks a lot of effort into proposals which isn't driven by actual
product or deployment needs.  I think there's a productivity
cost, because we get big pulses of work three times/year and not
enough gets done between.  The increasing valuation of meetings
doesn't really do much to discourage that.  (My real beef is with
being underresourced and oversludged and the amount of time it takes
to complete work as a result; if we had plenty of bandwidth and
tons of work was being done between meetings, less-than-useful
work wouldn't be a problem).

Melinda