Re: [Mtgvenue] Was Brisbane a success to be repeated ?

[Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Mar 25, 2024 at 08:53:34PM -0400, Ted Lemon wrote:
> Mark, forgive me for pushing back on your pushing back, but (I think?) we
> get that. We know it's easier to get stuff done in the hallway track.
> That's why I flew to Brisbane. And it played out exactly that way, as it
> always does.

+1

> My question is, do we know why this is, and is there anything we can do
> about it?

IMHO ?

Because engineers (used to) suck in socializing online.

I was involved quite a bit over the decades with tele-conferencing,
starting in 1989, and i think engineers are about the worst in using
all the different modes of collaboration for socialization. This is also
the to me only useful reason why manager in Silicon Valley have any
reason to pull engineers back into offices. Of course, IMHO they
primarily do this to protect their own job because many seem to think
their success metric is the number of buttocks in office chairs, but that's
a different topic.

This problem may not be so true anymore with younger generations, but i've
only got few data points about that from the IETF social tools, e.g.: when
we had this online group tool during online IETFs, which i felt was
used a lot more my younger IETF'er than older ones.

> Maybe that's not the IETF's job, I dunno, but it's really quite ironic that
> the organization that actually invented the Internet hasn't solved this
> problem yet. To be fair, I don't think we should be asking the secretariat
> to solve it. Like, we shouldn't be saying "hey, IETF, make the hallway
> track work online." I think that it might be useful though for us to
> actually work on this.

Probably most easily by waiting for one or two generation to be replaced by
younger, more clueful ones.

Cheers
    Toerless

> We had a really good bar BoF about this shortly before the pandemic. We
> didn't come anywhere near consensus. But I think it was a good discussion,
> and I wonder if we shouldn't have more of them.
> 
> 
> On Mon, Mar 25, 2024 at 8:38 PM Mark Nottingham <mnot=
> [e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> >
> > > On 26 Mar 2024, at 10:59, George Michaelson <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > >
> > > I would support this also being modified to "2 f2f 1 fully online or
> > > online-mostly" and then after a few years "1 f2f and 2 fully online or
> > > online-mostly" and by personal preference I suspect it's where I'm
> > > heading anyway. If we formalised it, we'd be able to reduce some costs
> > > to the org, because we'd be in smaller venues with less overhead. I
> > > also believe we should be pruning the WG and doing less in parallel,
> > > for less long, less days. (I am not entirely stupid and I know
> > > wielding the chopper will be very unpopular)
> >
> > I'm going to push back on this, a bit.
> >
> > I'm also involved in the W3C, which has two major meetings a year.
> > Granted, one of them is a bit smaller / more administrative, but it's very
> > noticeable how much harder it is to build relationships, maintain them, and
> > make spontaneous progress there.
> >
> > The hallway track is important; socialising the group is extremely
> > important. This can't be done online, unfortunately, and I don't see any
> > way to realistically do it; notably, the attempts to replace it were the
> > biggest failures during COVID.
> >
> > Just food for thought...
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > --
> > Mark Nottingham   https://www.mnot.net/
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Mtgvenue mailing list
> > [e-mail]
> > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/mtgvenue
> >

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