Subject: Time to encourage interims instead of main meetings?

From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2015 13:15:59 -0400

Historically there has been a pushback on a WG holding an interim meeting
instead of meeting at an IETF main meeting. Yes, cross-WG communication and
all that.

However, looking at my schedule, I really can't see myself justifying what
will be a two week interruption to fly out to Yokohama for a two hour
meeting and more importantly, I don't think many of the folk who I would be
looking to collaborate with at that meeting will either.

Now that IETF main meeting time is becoming an increasingly scarce
commodity, perhaps it is time to re-evaluate the old view that interim
meetings should not be a substitute for having a session at a main meeting
and instead start encouraging that for certain types of work.

Particularly early on in a WG, a two day interim can be a lot more use than
a two hour main meeting event.

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2015 15:16:50 -0400

Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]> wrote:
    > Historically there has been a pushback on a WG holding an interim
    > meeting instead of meeting at an IETF main meeting. Yes, cross-WG
    > communication and all that.

Virtual Interim meetings are a really good thing.  3-4 hour block of time.
The challenge is that all of the COTS providers (G+, webex, lync, goto*)
all have constraints that affect at least some group of people.
Our pure webrtc solution (JITSI.tools) does not (yet) work in as many
browsers as one would like... and the I* seem reluctant as a group
to try new things.

    > Particularly early on in a WG, a two day interim can be a lot more use
    > than a two hour main meeting event.

At two-day interim, an in-person meeting is definitely very valuable,
particularly early on in a WG's life, but there are significant issues if one
can't get all the critical participants to the meeting.

And a two-day in-person interim with a few remote participants is far less
useful than three 4-hour virtual interims, in my opinion.

--
Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>, Sandelman Software Works
 -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-

---

From: Nadeau Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2015 15:23:20 -0400

I am very much in agreement with you. 

	When issues were needing work in EMAN, I wish I had just setup interim meetings to progress issues along.  That might have sped things up by 2x. Instead, we tried to herd the cats via email/deadlines, or used the full meetings at deadlines.

	As an existence proof of success, the NETMOD WG has been holding more or less regular interim meetings to hunt down and solve issues around Yang 1.1 as well as modeling for about the last year. We have made rapid progress in both of those areas. If we’d waited for the main in-person meetings, we would not have made such progress for all the obvious reasons you cited below. Both of the Hawaii and Prague meetings had key people missing for the same reasons you cite below, resulting in a distinct lack of progress on issues.   I suspect we will have more of that given the far off/expensive/time-consuming nature of the upcoming meeting venues.

	—Tom

> On Aug 18, 2015:1:15 PM, at 1:15 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> Historically there has been a pushback on a WG holding an interim meeting instead of meeting at an IETF main meeting. Yes, cross-WG communication and all that.
> 
> However, looking at my schedule, I really can't see myself justifying what will be a two week interruption to fly out to Yokohama for a two hour meeting and more importantly, I don't think many of the folk who I would be looking to collaborate with at that meeting will either.
> 
> Now that IETF main meeting time is becoming an increasingly scarce commodity, perhaps it is time to re-evaluate the old view that interim meetings should not be a substitute for having a session at a main meeting and instead start encouraging that for certain types of work.
> 
> Particularly early on in a WG, a two day interim can be a lot more use than a two hour main meeting event.

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2015 08:27:20 +1200

I don't think we should encourage or discourage interims. I think we should
just make it clear that they are part of a WG's toolkit to use as appropriate.

For a new topic with a lot of issues to discuss, a two-day f2f interim can
make as much progress as a year of "normal" IETF discussion. For an ongoing
topic, a two-hour virtual interim can be enormously useful, but cuts out
people in some time zones.

I agree that nobody should fly to an IETF week for a two-hour meeting.
In my experience I fly there for about 50 hours of meetings; that's the
point.

   Brian

---

From: Leif Johansson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2015 10:50:11 +0200

On 2015-08-18 19:15, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> However, looking at my schedule, I really can't see myself justifying
> what will be a two week interruption to fly out to Yokohama for a two
> hour meeting and more importantly, I don't think many of the folk who I
> would be looking to collaborate with at that meeting will either.
> 
> meetings should not be a substitute for having a session at a main
> meeting and instead start encouraging that for certain types of work.
> 

Planing interims (esp. finding a time and place that folks can get
travel approval for) is usually a horrible exercise though...

---

From: Harald Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2015 12:13:38 +0200

Just observing that the other name for "virtual interim" is
"teleconference".

We've had pushback in the past about depending on teleconferences for
doing business - in particular people have cited the tendency of other
standards orgs to use regular teleconferences for making decisions and
thereby effectively shutting out everyone who can't be on the calls from
participating; we've cited our extensive use of email as a feature of
our process.

I do think that teleconferences have their place, as do face-to-face
interims.
Encouraging groups to meet at interims *instead* of IETF week? I am very
hesitant to do that.

Whatever the secret sauce of the IETF is (and no matter how tasty it is
after all these years), the IETF meetings are part of it.

---

From: Nadeau Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2015 08:47:36 -0400

> On Aug 19, 2015:4:50 AM, at 4:50 AM, Leif Johansson <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> travel approval for) is usually a horrible exercise though…

	I think that is missing the point; the idea is to have
virtual interim meetings (teleconferences with video i.e.: webex).
While in-person meetings can be effective, in my experience
repeated virtual meetings seem to achieve the same result without
all of the headaches associated with planning/managing a physical meeting
that people need to travel to. The travel issues people raised
earlier (visas, cost, ability to herd all the cats to one place for
a few days, etc…) still exist for any physical meeting and in some ways
are worse because people carve out space for the main IETF meeting while
most have packed schedules normally that are difficult to adjust for
an interim physical meeting plus the travel on either side. Virtual ones
enjoy the fact that while still having some of these challenges, most 
of the others are eliminated. And the benefit is that you can easily 
schedule many of these - even daily - without incurring any travel cost
penalties.  So if it takes 2 or 3 virtual meetings to accomplish what you
might do in one physical one, but you didn’t spend a dime on traveling
cost or time, this is a win.

	I will also point out that its also sometimes useful to fragment
meetings into smaller working teams (i.e.: design/sub teams), and
scheduling weekly/periodic meetings for those subsets to iterate on their
specific work items is an effective option. In NETMOD this has been successful 
in moving a number of specific work items forward rapidly without the burden 
of scheduling a full WG interim meeting, its associated management overhead.

	—Tom

---

From: Andy Bierman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2015 09:09:34 -0700

> Encouraging groups to meet at interims *instead* of IETF week? I am very

Virtual interim meetings are fine but IMO they are not better than
old-fashioned reviews posted to a WG mailing list and debated
on the mailing list.

I attend lots of VI meetings.
I have not yet attended one during my normal business hours.
I have  not yet seen an "Asia-friendly" VI schedule.  Perhaps the schedule
should shift by 8 or 12 hours every time and let some NA and EU participants
call in at 3am.

Almost always, the minutes from the VI either gloss over or misrepresent
my comments made during the meeting.  If I sent them in email to
the WG this could not happen.

> after all these years), the IETF meetings are part of it.

For somebody that just needs to follow just 1 or 2 WGs, because they are so
busy in
their day job with non-SDO activities, these meetings are not so important.
The IETF WG slots only provide time for status and maybe 1 or 2 technical
issues per meeting, so the IETF WG meeting slot is never going to
be the same as a 2 day WG interim.

Andy

---

From: Jared Mauch <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2015 13:03:27 -0400

> On Aug 19, 2015, at 12:09 PM, Andy Bierman <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 3:13 AM, Harald Alvestrand <[email-masked]> wrote:

I think the key here is to make progress on long standing stuck items.

Take NTP/TICTOC they have been trying for over a year to publish a BCP
after there were large scale NTP/MONLIST related attacks.  Hasn’t
progressed, some people need a due-date while others do.

IETF work can happen via many means but as anyone who has bought/sold a house
knows, it’s one of the days when most tasks are completed because of
a deadline.

> should shift by 8 or 12 hours every time and let some NA and EU participants

This is a challenge that I face for some quantity of work schedules.  Using something
like a Doodle to get consensus may help.

> after all these years), the IETF meetings are part of it.

I don’t think anyone is disputing this.

> For somebody that just needs to follow just 1 or 2 WGs, because they are so busy in

I think it’s all about deadline management.  As someone who is not working on another
task and writing this email, you can draw some conclusions about if my slides will be
ready for a meeting i have tomorrow, or if I will be doing them on the plane or
in the hotel late tonight :)

One size doesn’t fit all, but forward progress is the shared goal.

- Jared

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From: Rogerio Mariano - IETF <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2015 00:23:48 -0300

Hi friends,

I've been following this topic since the first email sent by Phillip Hallam. I speak from Brazil and participate in IETF initiatives for Latin America and the Caribbean. First, I agree with many points inserted for you, especially if you take into account the wear with long trips and the whole process for this trip occur in relation to the type of meeting. There is an initiative of the IETF-LAC Task Force Group (http://www.ietf.org/blog/author/jari/page/3/) whose Chair Alvaro Retana has run numerous remote sessions very successfully and accompanying for many participants to meetings of the WGs, much of them as pce, 6Io, mpls, spring, anima... as in the last IETF 93. I mean that there are face-to-face meetings that are extremely important and it does not matter if they are two or ten, these meetings need to be really happen.

However, if we consider that most matters are handled by the lists of early way, why the IETF does not encourage the use and participation of remote sessions in a more expressive way? Why the IETF does not create a default document type "IETF Remote Hub Technical Guide" to guide and instruct the participants? This initiative is made similarly in ICANN and ISOC. I think this way, increase the participation and inclusion of people from different regions in the IETF meetings, would be a good way to reduce costs and improve a lot the statistics on the perception of the IETF Mentoring Program, and optimize the process of physical meetings.

Best Regards,

Rogério Mariano 
rogermariano.cala [at] yahoo [dot] com    
http://icannwiki.com/Rogerio_Souza
PGP Fingerprint: 3005 9905 69C4 9931 126A  039C F33C 1E9A 972D B675

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From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2015 13:15:29 +0300

A healthy working group progresses their work in an efficient and timely
manner, using the right tools for the right job. Clearly we should be using
virtual interim meetings as a part of that toolbox. Not as a replacement for
the e-mail discussion or the physical list, but as a complement to them.
The number of interim meetings has grown significantly in the last couple
of years; the IETF seems to be using them a lot today.

My picture of an ideal working group meeting is that it has detailed draft reviews
on mailing list, resolving difficult issues on virtual meetings on a relatively frequent
basis, and having bigger discussions on face-to-face meetings. Examples of those
bigger issues include decisions to adopt new work, or resolving issues that
need broader set of participants for the discussion. In the meetings you are likely
to get that broader set of people that is needed for these kinds of works.

(You can also contrast this against some common failure modes, like working
groups that do not have enough mailing list or virtual interim work, but still
meet physically, working groups that have unresolved debates on mailing
list but do not organise suitable virtual or real meetings to properly handle
those issues, etc.)

Jari

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From: Abdussalam Baryun <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2015 15:23:23 +0200

On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 5:23 AM, Rogerio Mariano - IETF <
[email-masked]> wrote:

> However, if we consider that most matters are handled by the lists of
> early way, why the IETF does not encourage the use and participation of
> remote sessions in a more expressive way? Why the IETF does not create a
> default document type "IETF Remote Hub Technical Guide" to guide and
> instruct the participants? This initiative is made similarly in ICANN and
> ISOC. I think this way, increase the participation and inclusion of people
> from different regions in the IETF meetings, would be a good way to reduce
> costs and improve a lot the statistics on the perception of the IETF
> Mentoring Program, and optimize the process of physical meetings.
>
>
I agree with you totally. I think all WG chairs consider to make the
WG-list active, so the main channel for our work is WG_lists, then we use
other tools when needed and proposed by chair or WG. So taking the option
of other tools for work-discussion is the responsibility of the WG chair,
and needs to be agreed by the WG.

AB

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From: Rogerio Mariano - IETF <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2015 19:16:54 -0300

Hi Jari and AB, 

Thank you for your feedback.  I was very humbled to be able to actively participate in this important discussion :-)

I agree with you.. I just think that the process of disclosure of virtual meetings, indifferent to the level or importance of the meeting should be more widespread and better structured, the big question and that the process of virtual meetings of the IETF seems to be a bit complex, it is structured for those who already participate effectively (veterans) of the meetings..  for beginners seem to be more difficult to understand ... Maybe the chair of the WG(any) can do something, but would still rather not centralized policy, being under the responsibility of the WG chair on how to make this disclosure.

Thanks ever so much!

Rogerio Mariano