Re: [Manycouches] DOGFOOD Virtual BoF

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On Feb 11, 2020, at 5:54 PM, Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]> wrote:
> How about we designate one mailing list for discussions about that
> remote experience, then we might get a more organic incremental growth
> from where we are today a better place. Heck, we SHOULD (IMHO) even
> subscribe people automatically to such a mailing list during registration
> as a remote attendant.

Remote attendance is a completely orthogonal question.   Remote attendance is never going to address this problem.   If we have no choice, we’ll use it, and it doesn’t totally suck or anything, but if that’s our answer to how to reduce the number of IETF meetings per year, or how to collaborate successfully remotely, we will never actually make any progress, because this solution presupposes that in-person IETF meetings are what non-in-person IETF participants have to somehow access.

The right way to do this is for people who are doing useful work in the IETF to simply transact all their work on the mailing lists and in virtual interims, and refuse to participate in in-person meetings either entirely, or to some extent. 

I personally would not want to get rid of them entirely, although maybe that would be the best answer.   But three a year doesn’t really fit my workflow—it’s more of a problem than a solution.   So for me, restructuring my IETF work so that I don’t show up thrice a year is the way to go.   If everybody doing work in the IETF did that, maybe we’d get somewhere.   Even if only some of us do, we can get somewhere.   

But if we take as a given that important work is done in person, and that you can’t be effective in the IETF without flying three times a year, then no amount of fancy remote attendance is going to help.  It’s just a time-consuming rathole—when I brought this up in Prague, many of the conversations I had with people were about how to reduce latency to the point where remote attendees wouldn’t be inconvenienced.   Physics is against us here—that’s not the answer.