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

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 1:58 PM Stephen Farrell <[e-mail]>
wrote:

>
FWIW, I'm supportive. I'm also ok with the charter not
> including "should we keep planning 3 f2f meetings per
> year?" but I'd be even happier if that question were
> also included as in scope, perhaps relating to a milestone
> that's scheduled to be discussed only after the initial
> work is done.
>

I am also supportive and have a similar concern. But I can also see why we
don't want to go down that rathole. It is not at all clear to me that we
can have a useful or productive discussion today about a decision we may
never get to take because it ends up being taken for us. I have no idea if
we will meet at all in 2021. It is not just a question of whether we want
to meet, it is a question of whether we are allowed and whether the
economic conditions permit. There is a very real chance that by the time we
are next able to meet, a large number of people who are currently employed
are not.

So what I suggest is that we phrase the question along the lines of setting
out what we can get from different meeting modalities both for IETF
meetings and for interims.

And I would like to see requirements phrased in two different ways. First
in terms of selecting existing products for use. Second in terms of
features we should design in.

The post COVID world is going to be unlike the pre-COVID world in the same
way that WWII was the dividing line for our parent's generation. And if you
read any account of the 'post war' years you will find that the story is
almost invariably begun in 1950 rather than 1945. And thats because the
post war economic boom didn't actually begin the day after VE day or VJ day.

The world is still going to be in crisis even if and when a vaccine is
deployed. And the world is going to be looking at institutions such as ours
to come up with the solutions that are needed to meet that crisis and for
our new way of life.

We are not going to be going back to a world where working in offices is
the norm and work from home the rare exception. Just as WWII forced
employers to accept women into the work force, COVID has forced their hand
on work-from-home.

And we don't have the tools that are needed to really make that work yet.
SMTP remains woefully insecure, the only secure applications we have are
all walled garden models.

We can't build the infrastructure for the post COVID economy on the basis
of proprietary walled garden tech. Even if it succeeds in the short term,
the concentration of power will inevitably be dismantled for the same
reason the anti-Trust laws were passed.