Re: [Manycouches] Stay Home Meet Online (SHMO) draft and proposed WG

[Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]>]

On 27/05/2020 19:02, Alissa Cooper wrote:
> In reviewing this thread it seems like there are two key questions
> that were raised that bear on the charter text:
> 
> 1. Whether the charter should cover broader changes to the cadence of
> in-person meetings outside the context of cancellations. When
> developing this charter I had written up some text about this but was
> on the fence about including it as it does broaden the scope. I think
> including this as a work item but gating it on the completion of the
> other work items could be a nice compromise. This was the text I had
> to describe the work item:
> 
> - The cadence of meeting scheduling and the mix of in-person versus
> fully online meetings going forward once the disruptions caused by
> the pandemic have subsided. The working group is expected to document
> the expected future meeting cadence as a BCP if consensus emerges to
> depart from the existing cadence of three in-person meetings per
> year. Notably, any such guidance will not become actionable until 3-4
> years after it achieves consensus, given the length of the IETF
> meeting planning cycle.

I think that's plenty good enough.

S.

> 
> 2. How to be clearer about the level of specificity expected in the
> guidance to be provided. I’m not sure how to tackle this one.
> Regarding technology, my hope was that by saying “technology
> functionality” this would be sufficiently clear — e.g., recommending
> that two-way audio and video are available is in scope, whereas
> recommending that we always use H.264 is not. For the meeting
> planning work item I’m not sure what more can be said aside from
> using the term “high-level guidance.”
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Thanks, Alissa
> 
> 
>> On May 13, 2020, at 1:08 PM, Alissa Cooper <[e-mail]>
>> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> Unsurprisingly, there has been a lot of discussion in the community
>> recently about planning for IETF meetings in times of crisis and
>> disruption. Below is a draft of a charter for a working group, Stay
>> Home Meet Online (SHMO), that could start to develop long-term
>> guidance of the sort it would have been nice to have as the IESG,
>> IRTF Chair, and IETF LLC have been faced with decisions about
>> canceling the in-person meetings for IETF 107 and 108. It is
>> somewhat in the MTGVENUE mold, as the idea is to provide high-level
>> guidance about meeting-related matters. Suresh Krishnan and Russ
>> Housley and I have been working on this together.
>> 
>> The charter is scoped narrowly to only deal with cancellation of
>> previously planned in-person meetings. There are other related
>> topics that need community guidance — the nomcom eligibility
>> criteria that is already being worked on (see
>> [e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>),
>> the overall meeting cadence and mix of in-person versus virtual
>> meetings in the future, how to craft the meeting experience at an
>> in-person meeting when significantly more people are remote, etc.
>> But just the cancellation topics on their own will require a bunch
>> of work and may attract different participants than those
>> interested in other topics, so the boundary is drawn there.
>> 
>> We’re sharing this here on [e-mail]
>> <mailto:[e-mail]> to start community discussion about
>> it with the hope of either proposing a BOF or perhaps going
>> directly to chartering if there seems to be support in the
>> community for that.
>> 
>> We have also published an individual I-D
>> <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-cooper-shmo-questions-00
>> <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-cooper-shmo-questions-00>>
>> that lists out the questions and considerations the IESG has been
>> facing when cancelling an in-person meeting, just to serve as a
>> basis for discussion and give the community an idea of the kinds of
>> questions where it would be helpful to have guidance.
>> 
>> Thanks, Alissa, Suresh, and Russ
>> 
>> 
>> —
>> 
>> Stay Home Meet Online (SHMO) Working Group Draft Charter
>> 
>> The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the IETF's typical schedule of
>> three in-person meetings per year. It has caused the IETF to have
>> to convert previously scheduled in-person meetings into fully
>> online meetings. Although it is the first time the IETF's meeting
>> schedule has been disrupted, it is possible that other crises could
>> cause similar disruptions in the future.
>> 
>> The meeting planning activities that the IESG and the IETF LLC
>> engage in would benefit from IETF community consensus guidance
>> concerning novel aspects raised by these developments. The SHMO
>> working group is therefore chartered to provide high-level guidance
>> to the IESG and the IETF LLC concerning the following:
>> 
>> - Criteria for determining when a previously scheduled in-person
>> meeting should be canceled and replaced with a fully online
>> meeting. Similar to how RFC 8718 establishes community guidance for
>> the selection of meeting venues, the IESG and the LLC would benefit
>> from community consensus guidelines about which factors to consider
>> when deciding to cancel or replace an in-person meeting and the
>> relative importance of those factors. This work item is expected to
>> be fulfilled with the publication of a BCP.
>> 
>> - Meeting planning in the event that a previously scheduled
>> in-person meeting needs to be canceled and replaced with a fully
>> online meeting. Similar to how RFC 8719 establishes guidance for
>> the regional rotation of in-person meetings, the IESG and the LLC
>> would benefit from having community consensus guidelines about the
>> time zone selection, meeting length in days, and other high-level
>> scheduling aspects when an in-person meeting must be cancelled.
>> This work item is expected to be fulfilled with the publication of
>> one or more BCPs.
>> 
>> - Technology functionality requirements for the technologies the
>> IETF uses to support fully online meetings. This work item is
>> expected to be fulfilled with one or more informational RFCs.
>> 
>> The work of SHMO is expected to produce high-level principles, not
>> detailed operational plans. Specifications of details concerning
>> cancellation criteria, meeting technologies, and online meeting
>> agenda formats and content are out of scope. Discussion of
>> financial aspects of IETF meetings is out of scope. The goal is to
>> produce guidelines for the IESG and the IETF LLC to operationalize
>> while ensuring they have substantial flexibility to continue to
>> deliver and evolve the IETF meeting experience to best serve IETF
>> participants and the Internet community at large.
>> 
>> The disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic may have been
>> mitigated by the time this group completes its work, but the
>> experience of handling meeting planning during the pandemic has
>> proven that having community consensus guidance at hand when
>> dealing with novel conditions in the future would be beneficial.
>> 
>> 
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> 
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