Re: [Ietf108planning] Preview of survey on virtual meetings

[Jay Daley <[e-mail]>]

Thanks all.

I’m still parsing the comments but some changes jump out at me (all of which need to discussed and agreed with the small group)

1. The country question is intended to help us assess how the breakdown of respondents by country looks in comparison to the same breakdown of previous meetings.  The strange format is to make it easier to analyse the responses after.  I suspect it’s best if we just lose that question because it potentially allows de-anonymisation and because the time zone question later on it much more important.  We did have a regional question there which we should probably revert to (the change to a country question was made at the last minute).

2.  The list of roles has grown too big as additional items have been added. All we really need to understand is some measure of how important that person is to the functioning of a meeting, and so I’ll look at paring it back to the minimum for that.

It seems that the combination of these two questions at the front and the way they are asked sets the wrong tone and frustrates people at the outset, which is never a good idea from the survey.

Jay

> On 24/04/2020, at 6:55 AM, Warren Kumari <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Apr 23, 2020 at 11:29 AM Barry Leiba <[e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
>> 
>>>> Wow what a strange way to select a country... Can we simply list them? (I love to see
>>>> Belgium at the top for once :-) )
>>> 
>>> I agree that we really don't need this level of granularity -- a major
>>> geography option seems better, just like we do for.... oh, bugger, I
>>> didn't realize we capture this level of granularity for meetings --
>>> https://datatracker.ietf.org/stats/meeting/106/country/
>> 
>> Even if we need the country, a simple alphabetical list of countries is best.
>> If there's some reason to separate them by continent, it's certainly
>> neither necessary nor useful to separate, say, Eastern Europe from
>> Northern Europe.
>> 
>>> I'm somewhat uncomfortable that this survey it too long / granular,
>>> and that we are overcollecting / people will get bored midway through
>>> and we bias towards hardcore attendees...
>> 
>> Exactly the comment I was going to make: this is way too long.  If we
>> do something like this, we *have to* keep track of how many people
>> bail out... how many answer some of the earlier questions and none of
>> the later ones.
>> 
>>> "Subscriber to an IETF mailing list within the last year"  -- this
>>> feels like weird wording. I don't think I **subscribed** to any
>>> mailing lists last year...
>> 
>> This one, in particular, is likely to mislead, and the wording that's
>> there now is *better* than the suggested change.  We don't want to
>> know whether you created a *new* subscription, which is what I hear
>> from "subscribed to".  We want to know whether, during the last year,
>> you were a subscriber -- whether you follow discussions, which is hard
>> to judge, so "being subscribed" is a lame proxy for that.
> 
> Sorry, I was unclear -- I wasn't suggesting new text, rather pointing
> (apparently poorly!) out that this one is hard to parse / confusing...
> Perhaps "Regularly read an IETF mailing list within the last year" is
> clearer? Or follow an IETF mailing list?
> 
> Many people are subscribers to lists, but don't read them, etc. And,
> if we just cared about # of subscribers (no idea why we would), we
> could pull this from mailman...
> 
> 
> 
>> 
>>> "Posted to an IETF mailing list within the last year", "Posted to an
>>> IRTF mailing list within the last year" (and similar) -- do we need
>>> this level of granularity? Could it instead be "Posted to an IETF or
>>> IRTF mailing list within the last year" (and same for subscribe,
>>> chair, etc).
>> 
>> I agree.  If we want to know about IETF and IRTF separately, we could
>> simply ask "participate in IETF working groups" and "participate in
>> IRTF research groups".  It's a lot harder to tease out levels of
>> participation, and I'm not sure to what extent it's useful to try.
> 
> WFM.
> 
>> 
>>> "Have each WG write 3 sentences to justify why they need to meet
>>> during the meeting week rather than as an interim meeting" --- oooh,
>>> interesting, but how do we evaluate the answers? Monkey knife fight?
>> 
>> I went both ways on this when I read it, but in the end decided that
>> it has to be the responsible AD who decides, and then "discuss with
>> you responsible AD" works better for me than "each working group write
>> an essay."
>> 
>>> I think that there are way too many time zones listed - we may need to
>>> manually make a drop down if survey monkey doesn't have a ~24 item
>>> list... Yes, we may miss UTC+12:45, but meh...
>> 
>> Honestly, most of us are quite used to picking our time zones out of
>> long TZ lists anyway.  I don't really see that as a problem.
>> 
>> Barry
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> I don't think the execution is relevant when it was obviously a bad
> idea in the first place.
> This is like putting rabid weasels in your pants, and later expressing
> regret at having chosen those particular rabid weasels and that pair
> of pants.
>   ---maf
> 
> -- 
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-- 
Jay Daley
IETF Executive Director
[e-mail]