Subject: Re: Interim meetings - changing the way we work
From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
To: "t.p." <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked], ietf <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2015 11:50:59 -0500
List-Id: IETF-Discussion <ietf.ietf.org>

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. 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.