Re: BoF's in the Age of Covids

[Michael Thomas <[e-mail]>]

On 5/11/20 3:59 PM, Carsten Bormann wrote:
> On 2020-05-12, at 00:51, Michael Thomas <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> With a bar BoF it is much easier to gauge interest given the number of people who show up, and the number of beers consumed.  I am not aware of any virtual analog to this,
> A non-WG mailing list is the closest digital analog [sic!] we have.
> (Getting that has a lot more ceremony than the traditional bar BOF had.
> That maybe needs to be adjusted down slightly now.
> Garbage collection remains a problem.)
>
> Of course, you can also go ahead and schedule "side meetings”, i.e., web conferences, but these happen entirely outside the shell of the IETF (yes, like bar BOFs, except that these are strongly linked to an actual IETF meeting by colocation).
>
This is yet another aspect of what I've been calling the Water Cooler 
problem -- in this case I guess it's more properly called the Beer Keg 
Problem. I'm not sure if it has anything to do with ietf's core mission 
of making interoperable protocols, but it seems like it has a lot to do 
with ietf on an *operational* basis.

I wrote about this in a blog post a week or two ago if anybody's 
interested. 
https://rip-van-webble.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-water-cooler-problem.html

Not that it has anything useful to say about this particular 
manifestation...

Mike