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

[Vittorio Bertola <[e-mail]>]

> Il 12/04/2021 07:05 Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]> ha scritto:
> 
> Maybe some sociologist has studied this properly, but my starting
> bid is that two f2f meetings a year, with on-line meetings in
> between, would be enough to keep the IETF functioning socially.
> I think we've already seen evidence that more than a year between
> meetings is socially damaging, which is rather what I expected.

One thing I'd like to add is that not all participants have the IETF as their main context in their job. For people whose job is almost entirely focused on things that happen at the IETF, it will always be immediate to find time and attention for the IETF. However, for those of us that are following 5+ organizations at once, the physical meeting allows us to focus on this specific organization and on its community for a solid amount of continuous time, including time for socializing. This will not happen with interim online meetings in semi-random timezones, which will easily get skipped if not vital, due to the overlap with some other organization's meeting, to their unfriendly timezone or simply to non-IETF-related work taking precedence at that particular time.

In other words, my perception is that those of us who work in many organizations at the same time need more physical meetings than those who focus mostly on the IETF. To this regard, for some reason three meetings per year seems to be the standard (pre-Covid) number.

-- 
Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
[e-mail] 
Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy