Re: [Manycouches] [admin-discuss] Follow up on consultation on planning for IETF 111

[Andrew Campling <[e-mail]>]

Michael Richardson <[e-mail]> wrote:

> I mostly agree with you.  ADs have *not* been pushing back against virtual interim meetings for the past ten years.  Virtual interim meetings do not even require AD approval at all.

This made me wonder whether there would be merit in inserting a little more bureaucracy to reduce the volume of virtual interim meetings, both in total and generated by individual WGs.  A review of the scheduling would be useful too as I suspect (but haven't checked) that the majority are unlikely to be helpful to participants in AP.


> While there are some WGs which engage in significant synchronous activites, I think it's important to recognize that some tools like github issue work are in fact asynchronous activites, which just don't happen to use SMTP as their primary transport.   I also want to point out that in many cases, the use of meeting tools (including github) are actually having the effect of making design team activities *more* accessible by being more visible, not less.  People used to do weekly phone conferences for design teams back in the 1990s too, and they tended to be very exclusionary.

Whilst I know others will not agree, the choice of GitHub to edit documents is, in my view, particularly exclusionary for two reasons.  Firstly it erects yet another barrier to participation in IETF discussions by other stakeholder groups (GitHub is hardly a mainstream tool for such a task).  Secondly, as others have pointed out on other lists, it can encourage higher volumes of messaging, making it harder for would-be participants to keep track of a discussion unless they can follow it with the same degree of vigour as the most active WG participants (potentially difficult for those with day jobs not dedicated to the topic at hand).  


> Too many WG sessions occuring at the same time, to which to too many people attend.  Inherent in this is that too many WGs are in scheduling conflicts, which means that too few people are experiencing the same set of discussions.

> Too many sessions mean that people are exhausted, aren't spending enough time bored (i.e., with their brain free-associating), and there aren't enough occasions to chat with random other people who are bored.

Is this a function of the abbreviated day for the recent set of virtual meetings?  Would the longer day of in-person meetings address this, combined with the extensive time available for informal interaction throughout the week?  


> Were they less costly CO2 wise and $$$-wise, I would want more meetings, with shorter weeks.   Moving to two in-person and two virtual would be my goal as we resume.

For the record, and admittedly from my much less extensive experience of the IETF, I'd far prefer to see things revert to three in-person meetings a year.  Without these in-person meetings I believe that the IETF risks fracturing into a number of largely separate activities with minimal overlap, increasingly driven by the interests of companies and with little regard for the "big picture".  In-person meetings build a sense of community as well as fostering the cross-pollination of ideas, diluting the former risks harming the community over the medium-term.  


> well.
> I tried to capture this into a document, but I'm not going to work on a draft that this WG doesn't seem interested in adopting.  <insert rfc7221bis>.

On balance this does seem to be needed, does it fit here?  And if not, where?  


Andrew