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

[Alissa Cooper <[e-mail]>]

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] 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> 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 


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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.