Re: IETF 109 Preliminary Agenda

[Benjamin Kaduk <[e-mail]>]

On Sat, Oct 17, 2020 at 07:33:09AM -0400, David Noveck wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 8:34 PM Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> > On 2020-10-17, at 02:23, Michael Richardson <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > >
> > > It appears that session are scheduled starting at 05:00 UTC, which would
> > be
> > > 12:00(noon) Bangkok time.   It's really as if this meeting was being
> > held in Madrid.
> >
> > I don’t think you are aware when Spanish people tend to get up :-)
> >
> 
> Fair enough but I don't know when people in Bangkok typically get up and
> I'm not sure it is really relevant.  Typically on-site meetings start at
> 10am local time and go on to 5:30, creating a 7.5-hour window for meeting
> sessions.
> 
> Given that this is a virtual meeting,  it would make sense to widen those
> windows to allow some amelioration of the problems that this creates for
> some time zones, in this case, for those in the Americas.  Instead, the
> window has been shortened to six hours and I'm not sure why.

Could you expound a bit on why you think widening the block of time in
which sessions occur would be helpful?  IIRC we have survey results showing
that in a virtual format even the 7.5-hour window is too long to be
practical, and having a longer window is going to push more of the session
timeslots into times that are quite painful for more participant timezones.
My understanding was that the idea of having a consolidated virtual IETF
was to enable the cross-polination that occurs at in-person IETF meetings
where most participants are attending sessions in most of the timeslots.

Thanks,

Ben