Re: actions related to improving IETF meeting selections

[Melinda Shore <[e-mail]>]

On 6/12/16 5:42 PM, Sheng Jiang wrote:
> I
> personally believe it is feasible because the current three meetings per
> year is actually slowing down many WGs’ pace.

If so, it's because people are choosing not to progress
work between meetings, where "people" include both chairs
and editors.  By contrast, W3C is able to progress work
rather quickly (er, for the most part) and meets only
once/year.  However, they make heavy use of teleconferences,
collaboration tools, and mailing lists.

 > If you asked the WG chairs the question of how many f2f
> meetings per year are ideal for their WGs, in my guess, over 1/4 WGs
> would like to meet more than three times.

I've chaired a bunch of working groups over the years and never
felt that way, myself.  In a working group I chair currently
our editors rarely show up at face to face meetings and while
we're a lot slower than we'd like to be I'd say that has more
to do with problems that would not be resolved by meeting more
frequently or by having editors at meetings.

It is a little vexing that in many cases we're being asked
to accommodate the needs of people who haven't actively
contributed in the past and who don't show an interest in
actively contributing in the future.

I chaired an ETSI working group (TIPHON Security) a bunch
of years ago and don't think that their working style (nor that
of the ITU-T, or IEEE, or ... ) maps particularly well onto the
IETF, and consequently that it would be inappropriate to force
it.  Also note that ETSI and 3GPP (and W3C) and so on have
designated experts on salary to move work along, and it may
be worth considering the extent to which they're able to move
work forward by paying someone else to do it.

The question of the relevance of IETF standards is inseparable from
the question of their implementation and deployment, I think, and
the economic model underlying our work is quite different from that
motivating the work of the big, traditional telecomm standards
bodies.

Melinda