Re: [Manycouches] many-fine-dinners --- a view on how to organize virtual meetings

[Michael Richardson <[e-mail]>]

Thank you for your comments.
While there are a number of people who attend only 1 WG, aside from so-called
busy-bodies like me, there is also the entire IESG, IAB.

If our meeting structure breaks our management people, then we all lose.

Martin Duke <[e-mail]> wrote:
    > 3. *Longer days*: The IESG's consensus is that more than 6 hours of
    > videoconferencing is tough on the body under any circumstances, especially
    > when it's the graveyard shift for many people.  Furthermore, I believe that
    > people have a harder time filtering out their everyday life constraints
    > when at home, and so a longer day is particularly onerous.

I agree. I am not really proposing longer days.
I am proposing simpler days.

    > 4. *More days*: This would increase the true cost to employers, compared to
    > an in-person meeting, if it were any more than about 7 working days. I
    > believe, without any evidence, that holding sessions over the weekend would
    > be a non-starter for participation.

So I wrote "4-7 days", for two reasons:
  1) because we have 7 day physical meetings, and maybe someone wants to push.
  2) because we might want to pad the actual schedule so that people would
  have some recovery time.  This is consistent with people claiming travel time.

    > 5. *More interim meetings*: the near-universal interim start time of ~1500
    > UTC makes a lot of inherently discriminatory assumptions about what time
    > zones have the most important contributors and what hours are optimal for
    > any particular time zone. If we were to have regular virtual IETFs without
    > a canceled location as a timebase, using a random start time would be
    > better than optimizing for the Atlantic. That said, sometimes WGs enter a
    > phase where they're in the weeds, tourists are not that helpful, and indeed
    > entirely theoretical anyway. For these groups, interims are currently
    > available but I don't think we should be in the business of actively
    > encouraging interims for the reasons above.

I don't really understand this paragraph at all.

    > Furthermore, in many ways "have an 11am meeting every day for a month" is
    > more onerous than just blocking out a week. As the intended purpose of more
    > interims is to encourage more tourism in meeting week, this amounts to one
    > busy week followed by 1 month of daily meetings. I found this IETF 107
    > model to be far more disruptive than the alternatives.

I didn't like IETF107 format either, btw.

    > All this said, fewer conflicts are good! To me, the most promising avenue
    > is shortening sessions and placing restrictions on how many you can
    > request, a forcing function to reduce status reports and non-interactive
    > presentations, and instead focus on issues that require live-action
    > discussion. Of course, one of the big requests we got between 108 and 109
    > was "longer sessions", so your mileage may vary.

Yes, because people actually need the face time to sort things out.
It's not like we use physical in-person well.

--
Michael Richardson <[e-mail]>   . o O ( IPv6 IøT consulting )
           Sandelman Software Works Inc, Ottawa and Worldwide