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

[Alexandre Petrescu <[e-mail]>]

Le 11/04/2021 à 22:17, Andrew Campling a écrit :
> 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.

It is.

I know for example of some who refuse to use github for document sharing
because it is not on IPv6.  They might prefer gitlab or pastebin.com.

I agree with them.

> 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

Fracturing already happens within the 3-times a year in-person meetings.

I try to follow many WGs and often times things pop up in one WG that
would be contrary to what other WG thinks.  It would be the ADs to
notice and avoid that, but ADs are not 1000 people, just maybe 15.

It is that last-call email list who might work agains fracturing, but
that is an online tool.

I have an example at hand about such fracturing, but I will not talk
about it, since it is IMHO.


  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.

I agree with the sense of community at in-person meetings.

 From my part, I call it a trust building.  A joke I might have said
during a dinner, or a private note I might have shared to a co-IETFer
during a long walk at night in a great City... they stay recorded for
long times.  Based on that people trust each other much more than just
an email online.

But in dire times when it might be hard to meet, one might try to select
how to structure the trust best, such that to involve the least travel.

Nowadays nobody travels or meets, which is not an ideal situation with
respect to trust.

Alex

> 
> 
>> 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
> 
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