Re: Make an all-virtual IETF meeting a 24 hour affair

[Vittorio Bertola <[e-mail]>]

>     Il 27/02/2020 14:06 Andrew G. Malis <[e-mail]> ha scritto:
> 
> 
>     There have been a number of comments that an all-virtual IETF meeting would be difficult for some set of attendees due to time zone shifting while they're in their home time zone. While it's impossible to hold a particular WG session that works for ALL attendees around the world, let the WG chairs choose, for each WG, what time out of the 24-hour clock works for the majority of their active participants. It'll be up to the WG chairs to figure that out for each WG, with the approval of the relevant AD. But there's no reason why all of the WGs need to meet during the same "daylight" hours if the meeting is all virtual. WGs could also have multiple sessions optimized for different parts of the world, to spread the pain. Just a thought ....
> 
But people that have to attend multiple WGs that meet on the same day would potentially have to stay up for 24 hours, if each of those WGs chose a different timezone. I think this would be even worse, and it would make it hard to pop into WGs that you do not normally follow, which is one of the added values of IETF meetings.

It is very hard to solve the timezone problem. A "majority of participants" principle would mean that the minority would get the WG scheduled in the night at each and every meeting. Multiple repeated sessions in different timezones mean that the group would be broken up into smaller groups that would not talk to each other (this approach really only works for webinars). Even rotating the timezone from a session to the next has risks, as each session will tend to be disproportionately populated by people in the local timezone, so the set of participants will differ and the consensus could take different directions depending on that, leading each new session to undo the previous one.

In the end, compacting the meeting into the daytime of a specific timezone and rotating the timezone through different continents one meeting at a time seems to be the fairest and less painful way, and that's what almost all global Internet organizations do.

(Perhaps this thread should move to the manycouches list?)

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Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
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