Subject: Next steps on agenda experimentation

From: IETF Chair <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 May 2019 22:12:27 -0400

Hi all,

The IESG wanted to follow up concerning next steps for experimenting with unstructured agenda time now that the IETF 104 survey has closed. You can see the survey results on SurveyMonkey [1] or in PDF [2]. Our main conclusions are that unstructured agenda time seems to be appreciated by a significant portion of respondents, but people do not want to see unstructured time on the agenda at the expense of being able to schedule all WG sessions. The most popular choice for how to schedule unstructured time was to spread it throughout the week with longer breaks, although one longer contiguous block of unstructured time was also a popular option.

In light of this feedback and given that the Applied Networking Research Workshop will be taking place on the Monday of IETF 105 in addition to regular RG meetings throughout the week, our thinking for IETF 105 is to have WG meetings start later than usual, at 10:00 (as was done at IETF 95), presuming we can make this work once we see the WG/RG scheduling requests that come in. We would make meeting rooms available for sign-up during the morning hour and explicitly list the unstructured time as a block on the official agenda (it will likely be called “open meeting time”). If we’re not able to schedule all requested sessions, we would abandon the extra unstructured hour in the mornings in formulating the agenda. We will also make meeting rooms available for sign-up in the evenings after WG sessions end as space permits. The code lounge would be available as usual for smaller group meetings. The meeting would end mid-afternoon on Friday as usual.

Independent of this, when making session scheduling requests we are providing the option for WGs that want a 2.5-hour slot to request a 1.5-hour slot and a 1-hour slot and indicate that they want those two slots back-to-back, and we are going to attempt to provide those combined 2.5-hour slots for groups that want them. 

We solicited feedback from the working group chairs about this proposal and the feedback was broadly supportive. We’re looking forward to seeing how this works and continuing to refine the agenda based on feedback received.

Regards,
Alissa Cooper
for the IESG

[1] https://www.surveymonkey.com/results/SM-G2Y29JNFV/ <https://www.surveymonkey.com/results/SM-G2Y29JNFV/>
[2] https://ietf.org/documents/280/104_survey_results.pdf <https://ietf.org/documents/280/104_survey_results.pdf>