Subject: Re: travel funds for ietf for the next SCE talk?

From: Dave Taht <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2019 11:17:11 +0200

On Mon, Apr 29, 2019 at 5:32 PM Magnus Westerlund
<[email-masked]> wrote:
>
> Hi Dave,
>
> Thanks for bring this work to the IETF. Yes, I would also like to encourage you to discuss your proposal in TSVWG using the mailing list and eventually present this work at the next TSVWG meeting. However, there is not required to participate in-person. We frequently have remote presentations and from my experience that works well. I’m sure the TSVWG chairs can further advise you on this.

This is one of those replies that I had to sit on for a while because
it was so mind-boggling.

If you haven't noticed a few hundred messages about reforming the ietf
on the IETF mailing list to allow remote participants to have *a vote*
in how the ietf operates, you might want to review those.

A remote presentation is not enough to get a vote in how the ietf operates.

Remote participation on the mailing lists, in this case, was certainly
not enough. Externally it looked like the l4s/dualpi/tcpprague effort
was spiraling down the drain with a pesky FRAND patent, no integrated,
running code, and 4 as-yet unresolved theoretical problems weighing it
down.

But... it really did feel like matters were being settled in smoky
back rooms when this set of drafts, pitched to the IETF as a (rather
dubious) experiment, when it came out (hours after we submitted our
SCE draft) that cablelabs had announced their new standard (no doubt
expecting a rubber stamp from the ietf) a few weeks prior, and had,
indeed, been working in secret for 16 months to take over the "last
half bit" of the ECN header for their own use.

Radically enough, I do tend to think that the open source community
does need MUCH better *representation* within the ietf, and to
leverage Thomas Paine's writings, there should be "no standardization
without representation", particularly in cases where the code has to
be universally deployed. This requires actual IETF attendance, by the
coders or their representatives, at least presently.

Unlike all the other conferences we attend, speakers are not
recompensed for their costs in the IETF, either.

I still doubt that our new competing, backwards compatible alternate
proposal, will get any pull in various smoky backrooms, but being
there in person, giving a preso, and wandering the hallways still
seems to help. Especially... when the ideas and their implications are
so difficult to express to people outside the narrow field of
congestion control in the first place, and don't fit easily into an
RFC format without useful code, repeatable benchmarks, public
experiments and graphs as guides.

> Cheers
>
> Magnus Westerlund
>
>
>
> On 2019-04-28 15:54, Dave Taht wrote:
> > Several members of the open source "bufferbloat.net" group do
> > regularly participate in ietf mailing lists and remote meetings, but
> > it is rare that any of us
> > can actually afford to attend IETF. In fact, we've had no travel
> > budget for 3 years running. I'd mostly reduced my involvement to BABEL
> > after the AQM wg closed, and that remotely only.
> >
> > This past IETF, we had to hold a bake sale on the bloat mailing list
> > as well as melt all my credit cards in order to get our new SCE "Some
> > Congestion Experienced" AQM concept in front of the tsvwg and iccrg
> > working groups in contrast to the cablelabs dualpi proposal.
> >
> > (if anyone cares, the TSVWG talk and slides are here:
> > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQmWyr0JDJM&t=1h3m50s ) -
> >
> > The controversy in the open source community, covered here:
> > https://lwn.net/Articles/783673/
> >
> > We've been *very strongly encouraged* to present again at the upcoming
> > ietf in montreal, but I'm now in no position to sponsor the 2-3 core
> > people again that need to present the follow-on results in the 5 or so
> > related wgs. Is there an org, a fund, a means, a way, to get a bunch
> > of rather poor, but innovative, open source devs and theorist, out
> > there, that we can apply to? raise the ~9k needed? isoc? Something?
> >
> > (and if it were possible i'd rather like to have what I had had to
> > spend back, so I can pour it into recreating a network testbed for
> > this work. I'm not planning to attend, myself. The one trip alone
> > wiped out ecn-sane's budget for the year)
> >
>
> --
>
> Magnus Westerlund
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Network Architecture & Protocols, Ericsson Research
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Ericsson AB                 | Phone  +46 10 7148287
> Torshamnsgatan 23           | Mobile +46 73 0949079
> SE-164 80 Stockholm, Sweden | mailto: [email-masked]
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>

-- 

Dave Täht
CTO, TekLibre, LLC
http://www.teklibre.com
Tel: 1-831-205-9740

---

From: Magnus Westerlund <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2019 11:35:29 +0000

Hi Dave,

Please see inline.

> in how the ietf operates, you might want to review those.

I have noticed that discussion. Process changes are hard, and the one
thing I am certain over is that we need to have an open discussion about
what changes should happen to facilitate remote only participants to
have nomcom eligibility, right to sign recall petitions etc. Remote
participants are most definitely not on equal footing on that part. If
you think the IESG is obstructionist in this discussion, then it comes
from the position that if we would simply jump on something without
ensuring consensus on things we equally would be called bad things. We
can facilitate the discussion and ensure that it is given room. For
example a virtual BOF for these topics do make sense.

> A remote presentation is not enough to get a vote in how the ietf operates.

However, when it comes to be able to influence the technical work in a
WG a remote participant do have a fair chance. The one to one
discussions that happens in the hallways are hard to cover. That
requires spending a lot of time trying to reach out to people between
the meeting for those conversations. 

> running code, and 4 as-yet unresolved theoretical problems weighing it

I don't know what your expectations where here from what I would
consider a rather limited engagement you have had so far on the TSVWG
mailing list. I don't share the same view of L4S, although I would have
hoped for more rapid progress and more available running code.

> half bit" of the ECN header for their own use.

I have no insight into what has happened in CableLabs. However, it
fairly obvious from mailing list traffic and presentations that
Cablelabs had an interest in L4S. What I know is that we have discussed
L4S for a significant time in IETF. There was a BOF at IETF 96 which
resulted in the inclusion of the work in TSVWG. The framework for the
experiment was discussed, documented and approved in RFC 8311. Yes, the
specification of L4S as being developed have made slow progress, but it
has been making progress.

> coders or their representatives, at least presently.

I definitely like more participation from people implementing the
protocols in the IETF and Open Source contributors are important part of
that. Certain things can most definitely be done on the mailing list and
interacting with authors and being an author of proposals, even if not
present. There are challenges of not being present at meetings when
topics becomes controversial. Building a contact network is also more
challenging when not present at the meetings.

> recompensed for their costs in the IETF, either.

IETF is not a conference. We don't have speakers, we have participants
that drives proposals. I do not know of any standardization forum where
participants get reimbursed for contributing to the specifications.

> experiments and graphs as guides.

Yes, it is an alternative proposal. Where both SCE and L4S desires to
use the same half-bit of the ECN codepoint space. That is what makes
this topic really hard as it appears difficult to run the solutions in
parallel, at least outside of specific DSCPs, and thus especially for
the Best Effort class.

Your proposal has its challenges in respect to providing a clear
specification of what SCE are and provide that supportive material that
would sway people that your proposal are a better one.  To my
understanding the TSVWG chairs have been encouraging a constructive
discussion on the matter.

It might be that to reach maximum efficiency from your perspective on
this matter you need to have representatives attend the upcoming meeting
in person. Remote participant is an option as the previous email pointed
out and will have some impact. However, I hope you see that there are a
significant fairness issue for IETF as organization to provide monetary
support to some participants and implicitly their proposals. I wish you
luck in finding financial support, however I would kindly request that
you don't use IETF's mailing lists for such requests.

Cheers

Magnus Westerlund 
(as TSV AD responsible for TSVWG)

---

From: Dave Taht <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2019 14:01:39 +0200

> you think the IESG is obstructionist in this discussion, then it comes

I don't consider the IESG to be an entity with one mind.

> example a virtual BOF for these topics do make sense.

Reform from within moves slowly.

> mailing list.

Most of my interactions pre-date that work, on the aqm mailing list,
that we closed in part, because it seemed the aqm work had moved to
maintenence mode. We were off creating and shipping code, in qty (10s)
of millions, based on the accepted standards. Things had got stable
enough after releasing sch_cake to start considering an rfc8290bis
with what we'd learned from shipping all that code, in real products,
particularly on wifi, and to take a harder look at ecn, in general.

> I don't share the same view of L4S, although I would have

It was the total lack of any integrated useful code from the L4S
people, the dodgy benchmarks, lack of third party verification of the
benchmarks, and the long-nagging issues never resolved on the IETF AQM
mailing list that kicked off the ecn-sane design group (
https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/ecn-sane/wiki/ ) and its charter
last august. SCE is just the first of several outputs of that project.
There are several other projects going on in various states of
completion which we'll bring to the ietf once the code is in a usuable
state, or the papers gone through peer review.

> that.

And I would like more representation. I've largely stayed out of those
threads, because, really, I vastly prefer to just do the technical
stuff. I hope that progress is made.

>Certain things can most definitely be done on the mailing list and

Yes.
> participants get reimbursed for contributing to the specifications.

To clarify, I should not have said recompense. Elsewhere, speakers are
usually not charged conference fees when speaking. Their other costs
they eat.

> discussion on the matter.

Yes, but 'round here, it's running code first, specs later. Usually.

> you don't use IETF's mailing lists for such requests.

My request here was informational. We got offers of airmiles from two
ietfers, and that's a help. We're pursuing other sources of travel
funds.

There will be no further financial requests by us here, and this ends
this thread, as far as I'm concerned.

-- 

Dave Täht
CTO, TekLibre, LLC
http://www.teklibre.com
Tel: 1-831-205-9740

---

From: Joe Touch <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2019 06:47:06 -0700

Although this is a side issue....

> On May 10, 2019, at 2:17 AM, Dave Taht <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 

Speakers at conferences are not compensated. They register like everyone else - that has been ACM, IEEE, IFiP, and OSA policy - I know because in some cases, I *wrote* the policy. Students are typically required to register at the full rate if they present. In the majority of cases, even the chairs pay their own way or at best are comp’d registration.

Speakers at trade shows are paid, as are some (but not all) keynotes and tutorial presenters.  The latter often get only honoraria and a comp’d reg, not enough for travel/lodging in most cases.

The only  people who get a fully free ride that I know of are the IEEE Comsoc Board. 

Joe

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2019 10:00:00 -0400

> The only  people who get a fully free ride that I know of are the IEEE Comsoc Board. 

Hm.  I’ve never paid to attend IETF.  Granted, this is not because IETF comped me, but because I was fortunate enough to have an employer who could afford to send me at no cost to me.

This model unfortunately doesn’t work for open source developers who are not on the payroll of a company with deep pockets.

---

From: Joe Touch <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2019 07:12:24 -0700

> On May 10, 2019, at 7:00 AM, Ted Lemon <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> On May 10, 2019, at 9:47 AM, Joe Touch <[email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:

Nor academics. I stopped coming because I couldn’t find a gov’t agency interested in supporting my participation either (and my current employer doesn’t either).

This is a problem not only for general attendance but also for the IESG - which impacts some decisions being made as well.

Joe

---

From: Eric Rescorla <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2019 07:23:53 -0700

On Fri, May 10, 2019 at 6:47 AM Joe Touch <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Speakers at conferences are not compensated. They register like everyone
> else - that has been ACM, IEEE, IFiP, and OSA policy - I know because in
> some cases, I *wrote* the policy. Students are typically required to
> register at the full rate if they present. In the majority of cases, even
> the chairs pay their own way or at best are comp’d registration.
>

It actually varies. I have been comped where I was asked to give an Invited
Talk.

That said, the IETF is very different from an academic conference, and i
think it would clearly be impractical for the IETF to comp registration for
everyone who presented.

-Ekr

>
> Speakers at trade shows are paid, as are some (but not all) keynotes and
> tutorial presenters.  The latter often get only honoraria and a comp’d reg,
> not enough for travel/lodging in most cases.
>

---

From: Tom Herbert <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2019 08:10:57 -0700

On Fri, May 10, 2019, 7:00 AM Ted Lemon <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Hm.  I’ve never paid to attend IETF.  Granted, this is not because IETF
> comped me, but because I was fortunate enough to have an employer who could
> afford to send me at no cost to me.
>

Ted,

I have paid to attend IETF. It is expensive. In fact, for Prague IETF
registration alone plus VAT cost twice as much as the airfare to get there
from US! I was only able to justify the trip only because we ran Netdev
conference at the same location a week before.

>
> This model unfortunately doesn’t work for open source developers who are
> not on the payroll of a company with deep pockets.
>

Yes, and I hope this is considered a bad thing lest IETF becomes an elitist
organization with only a handful of bigger players running the show.

Maybe there should be a "non-sponsored" registration tier with a discount
to help make it affordable for the little guys.

Tom

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2019 11:53:10 -0400

On May 10, 2019, at 11:10 AM, Tom Herbert <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Maybe there should be a "non-sponsored" registration tier with a discount to help make it affordable for the little guys.

The problem is figuring out a sustainability model for IETF that doesn’t rely on attendance fees and hotel stays.

---

From: "John Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 10 May 2019 12:00:48 -0400

>to help make it affordable for the little guys.

This question has come up a lot of times before.  Unless you happen to
live where the meeting is, travel costs are generally a lot higher
than the registration fee.  We already have graduated fees, an early
bird fee if you register early, a one day fee that's about half the
early bird fee, and a much lower fee for students.

I gather that at the Bangkok IETF there was an arrangement for local
attendees, and the IETF chair has always had the ability to waive
someone's fee when needed.

---

From: Mary B <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2019 11:21:45 -0500

With the late fee being $1000 if you don't pay 2 weeks before the meeting
and the standard fee of $875, it can be a significant part of the overall
cost - even at $750, that's equivalent to 4 nights hotel in some places or
airfare.     And, as Tom pointed out, we're also getting hit with VAT in
some situations, so the meeting fee is not at all an insignificant portion
of the overall costs. Getting travel approval 6 weeks before a meeting is
rare where I am right now.  In some cases, I'm actually paying the airfare
myself so I don't end up in a middle seat in the back of the plane.  And,
nowadays, some of us can't be sure we'll have a sponsor by meeting time.
In the case that I don't, I register for a One day pass.   So, we can say
too bad for my company for not approving travel early, but it's double
edged sword in that if it's costing more to send me to meetings, they're
less likely to want to send me to meetings. And, right now, our travel is
highly scrutinized up the chain.   And, I don't think I'm a one off.

Per Ted's comment, there's not a particularly easy solution for
sustainability.  I don't think anyone wants us to become a membership
organization, but for the larger companies, spending 10s of thousands of
dollars to send people to IETF is pretty on par with what they pay for
memberships in  other SDOs, particularly since they aren't sending people
to IETF meetings every 4-6 weeks, so overall travel costs aren't nearly as
significant to participate.    So, our model does allow those larger
companies to have more influence.  We've seen the impact of that influence
in some WG consensus decisions.

Regards,
Mary.

On Fri, May 10, 2019 at 11:01 AM John Levine <[email-masked]> wrote:

> In article <
> [email-masked]> you
> write:

---

From: "John R Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 10 May 2019 13:12:19 -0400

On Fri, 10 May 2019, Mary B wrote:
> So, we can say too bad for my company for not approving travel early, 
> but it's double edged sword in that if it's costing more to send me to 
> meetings, they're less likely to want to send me to meetings. And, right 
> now, our travel is highly scrutinized up the chain.  And, I don't think 
> I'm a one off.

When I was on the IAOC (until a few months ago ) we didn't set the fees 
and deadlines arbitrarily.  The farther ahead we can predict our 
registrations, the better we can manage our costs.  We know that some 
companies aren't very good at planning ahead but there's not much we can 
do about that.

In this particular case, I would think that the extra costs of buying last 
minute plane tickets would be at least as much as the difference in 
registration costs.  Or if you're feeling optimistic, you can get 90% of 
your registration fee back until the day before the meeting starts, so 
register at the early bird rate and if you can't go you're only out $70.

Regards,
John Levine, [email-masked], Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2019 14:19:52 -0400

On 5/10/19 11:53 AM, Ted Lemon wrote:

> On May 10, 2019, at 11:10 AM, Tom Herbert <[email-masked] 
> <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
>> Maybe there should be a "non-sponsored" registration tier with a 
>> discount to help make it affordable for the little guys.
>
> The problem is figuring out a sustainability model for IETF that 
> doesn’t rely on attendance fees and hotel stays.

And this has been a problem since the early 1990s when the US government 
stopped subsidizing the meetings (and perhaps also the secretariat?).   
But I wish we'd try harder to find that sustainability model rather than 
constantly punting the problem, because the Internet has been suffering 
for all that time from a lack of diverse participation in IETF.

Keith

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 May 2019 08:33:54 +1200

On 11-May-19 02:12, Joe Touch wrote:
> 
> 
>> On May 10, 2019, at 7:00 AM, Ted Lemon <[email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
>>

Of course. But none of this is new and the world is a hard place. I missed one of the vital meetings of the IPng Directorate in 1994, the meeting that was the last chance for a major change of direction for what would become IPv6, because my then employer (CERN) had limited travel funds. I've always regretted missing that meeting. Too bad for me.

On 11-May-19 06:19, Keith Moore wrote:

>> On May 10, 2019, at 11:10 AM, Tom Herbert <[email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
> And this has been a problem since the early 1990s when the US government stopped subsidizing the meetings (and perhaps also the secretariat?).   But I wish we'd try harder to find that sustainability model rather than constantly punting the problem, because the Internet has been suffering for all that time from a lack of diverse participation in IETF.

I don't see how the IETF is supposed to fix the fact that independent open source developers are, um, independent. There is no money tree. And if you change the model such that funded attendees are subsidising unfunded attendees in significant numbers, guess what? The number of funded attendees will rapidly decline. It seems to me that the current focus on improving remote attendance facilities is really the best we can do, but again: if remote attendance really becomes as good as on-site attendance, the number of funded atttendees will rapidly decline.

I think that if there was a viable answer to this problem, we'd already have found it.

    Brian

---

From: Dave Taht <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2019 23:52:13 +0200

changing the subject line here, and killing some ccs. Is this
something that also belongs on the iesg list?

On Fri, May 10, 2019 at 10:34 PM Brian E Carpenter
<[email-masked]> wrote:
> I don't see how the IETF is supposed to fix the fact that independent open source developers are, um, independent. There is no money tree. And if you change the model such that funded attendees are subsidising unfunded attendees in significant numbers, guess what?

I'm not sure this actually follows. In other conferences you can apply
for aid. The requirements are pretty strict, you have to prove you are
unable to afford the fee, and in the ietf context, you'd also have to
prove you have something to say, not just attend.

As one example, the gaia wg had some really interesting speakers from
poorer parts of the world that got there somehow, when it was first
formed. How did that happen? Is it still happening?

A second idea, is that speakers in other conferences are usually free
or at a substantial discount.

What percentage of ietf attendees actually present their work?

>The number of funded attendees will rapidly decline. It seems to me that the current focus on improving remote attendance facilities is really the best we can do, but again: if remote attendance really becomes as good as on-site attendance, the number of funded atttendees will rapidly decline.

I certainly do believe physical attendance helps. The hallway track is
the best part of nearly any conference, actually. (in my case this
past ietf, after our major meeting was done with for the week, I just
sat outside and played my funny computer filksongs and all sorts of
people from all over ietf came to talk to me; that part of ietf was
great, as was the friday concert... The funniest part though was when
stuart threw a few hundred crowns in my case, which was the most I'd
ever made busking in my life....)

-- 

Dave Täht
CTO, TekLibre, LLC
http://www.teklibre.com
Tel: 1-831-205-9740

---

From: Paul Wouters <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2019 18:00:52 -0400 (EDT)

> What percentage of ietf attendees actually present their work?

Too many. Presentations should really be limited to recaps of
what has been done and discussed.

"presenting" is not an appropriate measurement for value to the IETF.
I know people who hardly ever present or are involved in new work, but
their feedback to new work is extremely valuable.

Paul

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2019 19:45:56 -0400

On 5/10/19 4:33 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:

> I don't see how the IETF is supposed to fix the fact that independent open source developers are, um, independent.

This reply seems to presume that "independent" developers should be 
considered by IETF to be the exceptional case, and only "dependent" 
developers (presumably those funded by huge corporations) have a right 
to sit at the big table.   I think it should be the other way around - 
IETF should be optimized to facilitate contributions from independent 
parties, and those with sponsorship are welcome to sit at the same table 
as everyone else.

There was a time when IETF was more like this, even after we had to pay 
our own meeting costs.   We got sucked into the mode of holding meetings 
at expensive hotels, especially after our attendance figures pushed into 
the multiple thousands and they were the only venues available other 
than conference centers (which were even more expensive).   It got even 
harder after IETF started meeting in more diverse locations (which it 
should have done, and which I supported).  But I also saw various 
efforts to raise the bar on participation and discourage the independents.

> It seems to me that the current focus on improving remote attendance facilities is really the best we can do, but again: if remote attendance really becomes as good as on-site attendance, the number of funded atttendees will rapidly decline.
>

I wonder whether if the organization had looked for an answer, we'd have 
already found it.

But conditions have changed and keep changing.    Remote participation 
is more feasible today than in the past.   And our attendance numbers 
are down from the late 1990s period which should give us some additional 
flexibility about venues.

I wonder if it's possible to rely less on face-to-face meetings, while 
still having them (because personal contact is still very valuable to 
enabling people to collaborate at a distance), and make the face-to-face 
meetings less expensive (maybe by making them shorter and more focused 
on facilitating the personal interaction that really helps people work 
well remotely.)

A tremendous amount of participants' time is wasted at our current 
meetings by making Powerpoint (and similar) presentations the normal 
mode of working group sessions.   Before we used Powerpoint, our 
in-person discussions were much more productive.    And that could help 
us make the meetings shorter and more useful at the same time.

Perhaps we can't completely level the playing field but there's plenty 
of room to do better.

Keith

---

From: "John Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 10 May 2019 20:09:48 -0400

>what has been done and discussed.

Agreed.  Way too many of them feel like "my boss wouldn't let me come
unless I tell him I am presenting" followed by a slide show of an I-D
we could have read faster by ourselves.

The best use of WG meeting time is to work out issues that we have
found to be too knotty to untangle in e-mail.

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2019 22:03:18 -0400

> found to be too knotty to untangle in e-mail.

Maybe all WG meeting presentations should be required to be made 
semi-Pecha Kucha style - strictly limited to 6:40 in time and no more 
than 20 slides.   The remainder of that slot would be reserved for 
discussions.

At least one or two of the last slides should have to have questions or 
meeting discussion topics on them.

The projection screen should be a white board for dry erasable markers.  
During the subsequent discussion, the presenter should be able to recall 
any of the slides onto the projection screen, and scribble on the white 
board as necessary.   A video camera should be pointed at the white 
board for the benefit of remote participants.   (It's also fine if it's 
a smart white board that can digitally transmit the scribbles to remote 
participants.)

Exceptions to this policy should require approval of two ADs. :)

Keith

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 May 2019 14:10:13 +1200

> formed. How did that happen? Is it still happening?

I don't know, but I suspect ISOC had a hand in it. Special facilities
for participants from developing countries are an excellent thing,
although the ISOC Fellowships seem to be on hold at the moment.

Regards
   Brian

---

From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 May 2019 22:34:38 -0500

> what has been done and discussed.

Disagree as to the second sentence; dunno as to the first.

New work usually benefits from presentation, whether in BoFs or existing
WGs targeting WG adoption.

> "presenting" is not an appropriate measurement for value to the IETF.

Agreed.

> their feedback to new work is extremely valuable.

Yes.  All sorts of work is there to be done.  Some of it is writing,
some of it is reviewing.  Presentations barely take resources by
comparison to our mailing lists (which take a great deal more cycles to
tend to).

Nico
--

---

From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 May 2019 07:26:58 +0200

> we could have read faster by ourselves.

That is a meme on this mailing list.

Strangely, I actually don’t see it that often in the wild.

If it happens (and I care about the WG), I’m likely to talk to the chairs.

> found to be too knotty to untangle in e-mail.

That is one very good use of WG time, although that can also be a good use of hallway time (or the opportunities for unstructured meeting time).
There are other good uses, such as validating consensus on some item of progress (or creating some consensus in the first place), or simply making use of the serendipity of having all those tourists in the room.

If you don’t like how your chairs are using the time, talk to them.
If you do this and they turn out to be hopeless, talk to the ADs.
(And if these are hopeless, talk to nomcom :-)

Grüße, Carsten

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 May 2019 04:58:02 -0400

I was about to respond to Brian's note, but then found Keith's,
which covers some of what I was going to say although I disagree
with him on other parts of the issue.  Inline.

--On Friday, May 10, 2019 19:45 -0400 Keith Moore
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>>> And this has been a problem since the early 1990s when the
>>> US government stopped subsidizing the meetings (and perhaps
>>> also the secretariat?).   But I wish we'd try harder to find
>>> that sustainability model rather than constantly punting the
>>> problem, because the Internet has been suffering for all
>>> that time from a lack of diverse participation in IETF.
>> I don't see how the IETF is supposed to fix the fact that
>> independent open source developers are, um, independent.
> 
> This reply seems to presume that "independent" developers
> should be considered by IETF to be the exceptional case, and
> only "dependent" developers (presumably those funded by huge
> corporations) have a right to sit at the big table.   I
> think it should be the other way around - IETF should be
> optimized to facilitate contributions from independent
> parties, and those with sponsorship are welcome to sit at the
> same table as everyone else.

I think optimizing for either is fairly hopeless.
"Independent" presumably includes open source developers,
contributors who support themselves as consultants or the like
with multiple clients with connections to IETF work,
contributors who similarly support themselves but whose clients
are mostly not connected to the IETF, academics with research
funding that can cover travel and/or at least some meeting
costs, academics without such funding, and probably several
other groups.  We (or at least ISOC) have also made distinctions
between people from developing countries and ones with more
developed ones (and I recall as discussion or two about the
meaning of "from" in that context).

At the same time, we continue to claim that all IETF
participation --at least as far as taking of positions and
determination of consensus are concerned-- is by individuals.
That is a myth, I think increasingly so, and I fear that it will
sooner or later get us in trouble but moving away from it would
be a big step.

> There was a time when IETF was more like this, even after we
> had to pay our own meeting costs.   We got sucked into the
> mode of holding meetings at expensive hotels, especially after
> our attendance figures pushed into the multiple thousands and
> they were the only venues available other than conference
> centers (which were even more expensive).   It got even
> harder after IETF started meeting in more diverse locations
> (which it should have done, and which I supported).  But I
> also saw various efforts to raise the bar on participation and
> discourage the independents.

I'm fairly cynical, but I've nonetheless seen little evidence
that any efforts to discourage independents were deliberate.
What I have seen would be consistent with people who have had
strong organizational financial (and other) support for meeting
attendance and participation losing track of the consequences of
decisions on those who lack such support and for whom even
relatively small incremental costs may be significant.  As
examples, I note that the pushback from "independents" against
expanding meetings to include Fridays were largely dismissed.
Various efforts to limit the number of WGs or raise the
threshold for starting them or continuing ones that are not
performing (which could have helped hold down costs as well as
the size of the IESG) having gotten traction either, I tend to
assume for the same reason.  We've also very significantly
increased the number of interim meetings in recent years and
there has been, AFAICT, no effort to question the
appropriateness or necessity of those and balance their
importance against the risks of making is much more difficult
for some members of the community to participate.

>> It seems to me that the current focus on improving remote
>> attendance facilities is really the best we can do, but
>> again: if remote attendance really becomes as good as on-site
>> attendance, the number of funded atttendees will rapidly
>> decline.

> I wonder whether if the organization had looked for an answer,
> we'd have already found it.

I would have said "looked in the right places".  For example, if
remote participation works (as I have found it does if one
understands and accepts the limitations), the number of
Wg-specific interims is on the increase, and we are (I believe)
seeing less actual cross-area in-depth technical review than we
did a decade ago, perhaps those factors are enough of our
present-day reality that we could consider dropping from three
f2f plenary-type meetings a year to two, a move that, all other
things being equal, would result in an immediate 33% drop in
costs to participants and, unlike many other proposals, would
presumably produce a significant drop in Secretariat and other
overhead costs.  There have been a few suggestions to consider
that too and they have gone nowhere (and that doesn't mean "the
community discussed them and reached rough consensus").

> But conditions have changed and keep changing.    Remote
> participation is more feasible today than in the past.   And
> our attendance numbers are down from the late 1990s period
> which should give us some additional flexibility about venues.
 
> I wonder if it's possible to rely less on face-to-face
> meetings, while still having them (because personal contact is
> still very valuable to enabling people to collaborate at a
> distance), and make the face-to-face meetings less expensive
> (maybe by making them shorter and more focused on facilitating
> the personal interaction that really helps people work well
> remotely.)

Yes, and see above.  But despite my preference for four-day
meetings over five (if only to avoid killing two consecutive
weekends for most participants), I'm guessing that most of the
costs of holding a meeting (both overhead and to participants)
are associated with holding the meeting, i.e., that while
chopping off a day or two would save money, it would save a lot
less than the proportion of that time to current total meeting
time.

> A tremendous amount of participants' time is wasted at our
> current meetings by making Powerpoint (and similar)
> presentations the normal mode of working group sessions.  
> Before we used Powerpoint, our in-person discussions were much
> more productive.    And that could help us make the
> meetings shorter and more useful at the same time.

I can't add much to what others have said about this.  However,
although I have many days when I believe that overhead
projectors and whiteboards were far superior for interactive
presentations and discussions than video presentations of slides
(PowerPoint or otherwise), I don't see any way to get back to
those times.   I also see efficient real-time drawing or editing
by remote participants as being unlikely, so there may also be a
tradeoff involved.  

> Perhaps we can't completely level the playing field but
> there's plenty of room to do better.

Yes.  I think the prerequisite to significant improvement is a
change in attitude and increased awareness of  the degree to
which costs, even at present levels, are increasing the
homogeneity of the IETF and biasing against or excluding
perspectives that are badly needed.  The oft-repeated saying is
"tell it to the Nomcom" but the same kinds of costs, as well as
our current eligibility criteria, tend to create Nomcoms that
are highly biased toward those with strong organizational
(usually corporate) support, many of whom are not sensitive
enough how the associated assumptions change the IETF's
effective composition and that of its leadership bodies.
Similarly, if a particular body tells the Nomcom that someone
cannot be an effective member of that body unless they can and
will attend three full IETF meetings a year (probably for seven
rather than five days), another several days in one or two
"retreats", and perhaps some f2f interim meetings -- I hope I'm
exaggerating, but fear that I'm not-- perhaps the community
should be pushing back and asking hard questions about the value
of those requirements versus the effect of excluding almost
anyone who does not have full-time corporate support and
essentially unlimited travel budget for those roles.

These are obviously much broader questions than ones about
support for a few extra people to get to a meeting, but I don't
see how to answer the narrower question fairly without
addressing at least some of the broader ones.

   john

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 May 2019 11:47:55 -0400

> meaning of "from" in that context).

I (mostly) don't think IETF should care how people make their money.    
It should be okay if they're independently wealthy.  It should be okay 
if they sell pencils on the street.    It should be okay if they're 
retired.   It should be okay if they're academics or work in industry or 
for nonprofits.   It should be okay if they work for a government, 
though maybe it shouldn't be okay for them to lie about what their jobs are.

I think IETF should try to structure itself so as to enable effective 
participation for as many /willing //and qualified//individual 
participants/ as it can.

I certainly don't mind ISOC or others assisting people from developing 
countries.   Though unless the funding available is very much greater 
than I've seen evidence of, I don't think IETF should use this as a way 
to assure itself that it's open to broad participation.

> sooner or later get us in trouble but moving away from it would
It was less of a myth when it was easier for individuals to 
participate.   To the extent that it's more of a myth today, it's 
largely because IETF has increased the barriers to effective individual 
participation.
> relatively small incremental costs may be significant.

What I've mostly seen would be consistent with people making decisions 
that it should have been obvious would harm the ability of ordinary 
individuals to participate, even if not ostensibly done for those 
reasons.   I have also heard a few influential people argue out loud 
that non-industry folks shouldn't have a seat at the table.   They're 
entitled to their opinions, of course, but it's not like the current set 
of conditions should be a surprise to anyone who has been around for awhile.

> overhead costs.

Or it might be that the increased number of WG-specific interim meetings 
are part of the problem, especially if they're face-to-face meetings 
(worse if held in non-diverse locations) or even remote meetings if not 
held in widely-varying timezones.

> those times.

Why not?   It's not as if similar technologies are unavailable or 
cost-prohibitive.   The only barrier I see is mindshare.   I'm reminded 
of what Grace Hopper used to say, something like: "The worst reason to 
do anything is we've always done it that way".

We're smart, creative people.   We can do better.

> I also see efficient real-time drawing or editing

Well, as long as we're all using mice to draw, efficient real-time 
drawing even on local machines remains unlikely, so I guess that one is 
a hardware problem.

Keith

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 May 2019 16:06:11 -0400

Keith Moore <[email-masked]> wrote:
    > developers (presumably those funded by huge corporations) have a right to sit
    > at the big table. I think it should be the other way around - IETF should be
    > optimized to facilitate contributions from independent parties, and those
    > with sponsorship are welcome to sit at the same table as everyone else.

I think that, compared to other so-called SDOs, that the IETF is very much
already heavily optimized in that way.

    > There was a time when IETF was more like this, even after we had to pay our
    > own meeting costs. We got sucked into the mode of holding meetings at
    > expensive hotels, especially after our attendance figures pushed into

Yes, it used to more like that, it is true.
I think we could consciously shrink our meeting size to fit into smaller
venues, but that decision would itself be considered to be excluding people.

--
]               Never tell me the odds!                 | ipv6 mesh networks [
]   Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works        |    IoT architect   [
]     [email-masked]  http://www.sandelman.ca/        |   ruby on rails    [

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 May 2019 20:56:48 -0400

> already heavily optimized in that way.

I'm reminded of a sign that I once saw that said "Mediocrity is 
excellence at pursuing the mean", and thinking "That must be the motto 
of <X>!"

(X was an organization in which I'd invested a lot of energy, and I 
thought this because they were constantly comparing themselves with 
other similar organizations both as a way of making decisions, and also 
as a way to reassure themselves that they were "good enough")

Let's not make that IETF's motto.

> venues, but that decision would itself be considered to be excluding people.

I think it's possible that our attendance is small enough now, that 
we're on the ragged edge now of having a wider choice of venues.   But I 
don't want to discourage attendance!   I'd rather see if we can make the 
meetings a bit (a) shorter, (b) less expensive (including both hotel and 
travel cost), and (c) more productive for the money/time expenditure, 
thus a better value for those footing the bill.

Keith

---

From: Dave Taht <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 08:33:49 +0200

Changing the subject line yet again.

> thus a better value for those footing the bill.

Zombie projects stagger through the hallways. Most orgs (of any sort)
do do a yearly review of their projects and kill a percentage of them
if they are not showing results. In my case I use very different
techniques to ensure good code and standards, among others, the game
of dealer,
( https://www.amazon.es/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-Parc-Computer/dp/0887309895
), and focusing
(48 pt font) on running code and public deployment, more than rough
consensus (8pt font).

I can think of quite a few working groups within the ietf with
projects on their agenda that were long ago surpassed by market
forces, and the need for any further standards to appear, long since
vanished. The winners in the market stop going to ietf, the losers
plunk along trying to get their stuff standardized. To avoid howling
here I'll skip mentioning the dozens I have on my list, and just pick
on one that I was present at the founding of, homenet.

Market forces have completely shifted out from under that working
group. No serious vendor
support ever appeared. The vendors most affected, never showed up.
Specs exist, but code doesn't. There was a very good preso on all this
at homenet 104. The members of that working group hummed
overwhelmingly to recharter at ietf 104. After that, however, several
core members of the group expressed to me that it would be best to
shutter it entirely and attempt to move the core to an org that was
actually focused on running code, more than further specifications and
further wading through ietf processes, and thus, meet elsewhere,
entirely.

I feel a lot of working groups here could adopt the best of the ietf
processes, dump the rest,
and disband their ietf presence, meeting using better tools, cheaper
hotels, and leaner processes.

>From the bottom up, and the top down, it would be better to
periodically ask hard questions (is this tech going to work?), do a
market review (is this standard (still) needed?),  and so on.

Asking each working group to justify its continued existence and need
for meeting space with a set of hard questions might be a start.
Identifying what questions to ask, a start to that start.

An ietf with 30% less working groups, and a larger percentage of the
remainder working on standards that might matter, would be a better
ietf.

It is always easier to add, rather than subtract.

-- 

Dave Täht
CTO, TekLibre, LLC
http://www.teklibre.com
Tel: 1-831-205-9740

---

From: Stewart Bryant <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 09:30:16 +0100

> than 20 slides.   The remainder of that slot would be reserved for 

Unfortunately size does not fit all.

Stewart

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 09:23:26 -0400

> Unfortunately size does not fit all.

Indeed (and I did say that exceptions could be made).   But I suspect 
we'd make far better use of our time if we did something like this.   
Strict adherence to Pecha Kucha is probably not quite the right model, 
it's just one that may be familiar to lots of people by now.   But we 
absolutely need to get out of the mode of assuming that IETF WG meetings 
consist mostly of presentations with a little bit of discussion squeezed 
in.   Instead of 90% presentation and 10% discussion, it needs to be 
closer to the other way around.

Keith

---

From: Stephen Farrell <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 14:34:55 +0100

Hiya,

(With homenet co-chair hat on...)

On 12/05/2019 07:33, Dave Taht wrote:
>  To avoid howling
> at homenet 104. 

Yes, homenet WG participants have handled these issues
explicitly and (I think) very well, so describing this
one a zombie would be incorrect. Rather, it's a WG whose
participants are trying to address and not ignore the
issue of how relevant the planned work continues to be.

> The members of that working group hummed
> overwhelmingly to recharter at ietf 104. 

The people in the room hummed that way yes. My co-chair
recently started the discussion on the list to try to
confirm or refute that conclusion. (Personally I think
hums like that are likely to be a bit too positive for
"do something" so I figure this needs more than just
not disagreeing with that hum on the list.)

It'd be great if interested folks got involved in the
discussion on the homenet list.

On the general points: I'd be for reducing the number
of WGs that have formal sessions at IETF f2f meetings.
I'm not fussed about the overall number of WGs that
appear to exist - I'm fine if the IESG handle that
however they want. I'd not be in favour of reducing
the scope of the IETF in terms of the breadth of topics
that are considered in-scope.

Cheers,
S.

> After that, however, several

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 09:39:48 -0400

Dave, thanks for raising tough questions.

I am somewhat skeptical that IETF should place too much emphasis on its 
estimation of the "market".   I remember one working group that started 
out saying "we're just going to standardize whatever <big company> does, 
since they'll win anyway" (even though the resulting standard would 
likely not have worked well for users of other companies' products).   
Fortunately, they didn't end up doing that, and while what they produced 
was bloated and baroque, and I'm not even sure that <big company> 
supports it, the IETF standard was implemented in an open source 
project, which was adopted by other vendors' products.   And the 
computing world has become larger and more diverse so that<big 
company>'s products are not as relevant as they used to be.

And yet, the zombie projects you cite absolutely do exist in IETF, in 
significant numbers.

I have rarely seen a WG vote to disband itself rather than take on new 
work.   Some WGs naturally wind down because their work was inherently 
tightly scoped, so it's obvious when they're done. For others, at every 
meeting more drafts with less overall relevance are adopted.

But somehow there's a belief that ADs should not be able to kill WGs.   
There's a strong feeling that people who have invested in a WG should 
not have it pulled out from under them like a rug.

Nobody likes a project that they've been working on to be terminated, 
and I can't say that such decisions made in industry are generally 
wise.   But cancellations are nonetheless sometimes necessary.   Some 
WGs go off in the weeds and never correct themselves, and continue to 
meet for many years, taking up precious meeting slots and AD and chair 
and participant resources.   Sometimes it turns out that the WG's 
original idea just wasn't that good, or wasn't as easy to realize as it 
initially seemed, or the participants simply aren't willing to reach any 
kind of consensus.   And sometimes a WG's work is overtaken by events.

Zombie WGs aren't just taking up resources for those who participate in 
and manage them.   They make IETF less interesting overall, and decrease 
IETF's perceived relevance to its own participants and to the world.

I remember when you could get real work done in IETF meetings. The 
meeting slots were long enough and you could often get two of them 
scheduled within the week, so between the meetings you could get 
together with the relevant people, hash out the necessary compromises, 
and revise the I-D before the week ended.    Meeting time was devoted to 
discussion, presentations were rare, there was no PowerPoint.    There 
wasn't a microphone queue to slow everybody down, and the seating wasn't 
squished together so tightly that most participants couldn't get up to 
speak.   There was no WiFi in the room, so the room wasn't full of 
people glued to laptops doing other things and distracting from the 
discussion.   And the WGs didn't take on a lot of peripheral work, they 
were tightly focused on a small number of drafts.

(and yeah, some of those things needed to change, but most of the 
changes were made without much consideration of how they'd affect our 
ability to do work)

These days it seems like you spend thousands of dollars to travel 
halfway around the world to meet for 2 hours, or meet for longer in a 
broadly-scoped WG that only has a few minutes to devote to the project 
you're working on, and 90% of that time is devoted to staring at a 
screen.   And somehow this is supposed to facilitate progress.

What would IETF meetings be like if they were primarily set up to 
facilitate production and testing of running code?

Keith

---

From: Dave Taht <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 19:31:17 +0200

> issue of how relevant the planned work continues to be.

I knew that no matter whose ox I chose to gore with any example,
someone would rise to defend it.

> not disagreeing with that hum on the list.)

After my discussions with the participants afterwards, I have decided
to change my hum to "shift the dns-sd work to some other group, and
disband".

> discussion on the homenet list.

And publicity (good or bad), is generally helpful in attracting
interest to problems. So here's some. :)

but: IMHO it's not further discussion that's needed, in homenet.
There's too many specs needing source code.

Until some government(s), some corporation(s), some foundation(s),
some billionaire(s), banks, insurance agencies, etc, step up to
provide the millions of dollars, required, of  many man-years  of
solid, dedicated, engineering time, integration, and QA, AND somehow
get the home router makers and software developers all on the same
page, homenet's goals cannot be achieved. And there are other things
along the edge of the Net that should gain priority.

This past christmas... I'd set aside some time to test the new
babel-hmac extensions, but got sucked into helping solve a serious
security bug affecting all MIPS devices (including many home routers),
instead. ( https://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-devel/2019-January/015528.html
 )

I lost last year's christmas vacation to spectre/meltdown (and then some).

"Increasingly, as the world of pervasive networks and ubiquitous
computing hackers imagined decades ago has become reality, we’re not
just the innovators who thought of it first. Now we’re responsible;
having created the future, we have to maintain it. And, as the sinews
of civilization become ever more dependent on the Internet and
software-intensive communications devices, that responsibility gets
more serious every year." - - "Holding up the sky" -
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4196

> that are considered in-scope.

That is not the qualifier I use above. I essentially said if market
forces didn't align (after a while) there is no point in continuing.

> > further wading through ietf processes, and thus, meet elsewhere,

Hackathons are not enough.

Anyway, as the last major ietf thing I cared about finishing
(babel-hmac) is complete, and, of the new things we laid out in ietf
104, I'm *absolutely*, 100%, never, no way, not, never, ever, going to
be involved with at a standards level (at which I think more than a
few will heave a sigh in relief!), I think it is time I quit the ietf,
entirely. I don't think I'll ever manage to communicate the
horrifically vast gaps in priorities, approaches, and problems that I
think that the ietf and internet have, here, or affect any change.
Continuing to try is futile, and dealing with the mailing list
traffic, wasteful of our time and my emotive energy. I'm much better
off focusing on what I do best.

I've played a LOT of guitar with various bands in the last months, so
I'll leave you with a song from ietf 104:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTPJO-cAAjQ&t=6m24s

So long and thanks for all the fish.

--

Dave Täht
CTO, TekLibre, LLC
http://www.teklibre.com
Tel: 1-831-205-9740

---

From: Jared Mauch <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 14:42:12 -0400

> On May 12, 2019, at 9:34 AM, Stephen Farrell <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> 
> Hiya,
> 

Yes, I think this is a great case (and I participated in some of the discussion that Barbara kicked off at the microphone, I think it was in BKK).  

I gave my feedback there and hopefully it’s still resonating about the simplicity of supporting the technology we deploy.

> that are considered in-scope.

I see some Was doing lots of interims on the announce list, perhaps it’s better to do this as it levels the playing field and perhaps moves the work forward faster as well.

- Jared

---

From: Jared Mauch <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 14:50:33 -0400

> On May 12, 2019, at 9:39 AM, Keith Moore <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> I am somewhat skeptical that IETF should place too much emphasis on its estimation of the "market".   I remember one working group that started out saying "we're just going to standardize whatever <big company> does, since they'll win anyway" (even though the resulting standard would likely not have worked well for users of other companies' products).   Fortunately, they didn't end up doing that, and while what they produced was bloated and baroque, and I'm not even sure that <big company> supports it, the IETF standard was implemented in an open source project, which was adopted by other vendors' products.   And the computing world has become larger and more diverse so that<big company>'s products are not as relevant as they used to be.

I can think of some where it’s more expensive to use the new thing, people still are trying to peddle that new thing and away we go marching because surely we must invent something new here (otherwise how can I justify my travel?).

> And yet, the zombie projects you cite absolutely do exist in IETF, in significant numbers.

I’ve seen various zombies over the years, drafts that get version bumped to stay alive, WGs that schedule meetings to stay alive and a failure to end or merge in a timely manner.  

> I have rarely seen a WG vote to disband itself rather than take on new work.   Some WGs naturally wind down because their work was inherently tightly scoped, so it's obvious when they're done. For others, at every meeting more drafts with less overall relevance are adopted.
> 
> But somehow there's a belief that ADs should not be able to kill WGs.   There's a strong feeling that people who have invested in a WG should not have it pulled out from under them like a rug.

People can collaborate outside the IETF process as well.  Not only are there other standards groups out there (IEEE and W3C to name a few), there’s smart technical people who may not be aware of or consider using the IETF as their venue as what they have is working well without others.

> Nobody likes a project that they've been working on to be terminated, and I can't say that such decisions made in industry are generally wise.   But cancellations are nonetheless sometimes necessary.   Some WGs go off in the weeds and never correct themselves, and continue to meet for many years, taking up precious meeting slots and AD and chair and participant resources.   Sometimes it turns out that the WG's original idea just wasn't that good, or wasn't as easy to realize as it initially seemed, or the participants simply aren't willing to reach any kind of consensus.   And sometimes a WG's work is overtaken by events.
> 
> Zombie WGs aren't just taking up resources for those who participate in and manage them.   They make IETF less interesting overall, and decrease IETF's perceived relevance to its own participants and to the world.

I do try to play ‘WG Tourist’ at each IETF, but also have sometimes 3x conflicts of things that either I care deeply about or am interested in because of years operating that infrastructure (DNS & Routing for example).

> I remember when you could get real work done in IETF meetings. The meeting slots were long enough and you could often get two of them scheduled within the week, so between the meetings you could get together with the relevant people, hash out the necessary compromises, and revise the I-D before the week ended.    Meeting time was devoted to discussion, presentations were rare, there was no PowerPoint.    There wasn't a microphone queue to slow everybody down, and the seating wasn't squished together so tightly that most participants couldn't get up to speak.   There was no WiFi in the room, so the room wasn't full of people glued to laptops doing other things and distracting from the discussion.   And the WGs didn't take on a lot of peripheral work, they were tightly focused on a small number of drafts.
> 
> (and yeah, some of those things needed to change, but most of the changes were made without much consideration of how they'd affect our ability to do work)
> 
> These days it seems like you spend thousands of dollars to travel halfway around the world to meet for 2 hours, or meet for longer in a broadly-scoped WG that only has a few minutes to devote to the project you're working on, and 90% of that time is devoted to staring at a screen.   And somehow this is supposed to facilitate progress.

The progress is often not what’s on the screen, it’s the discussion that’s fostered afterwards in the hallway or elsewhere (see: bar BoF).

> What would IETF meetings be like if they were primarily set up to facilitate production and testing of running code?

I think they would look a lot like a hackathon.  Those are things that do seem to work well across the board, as do lightning talks in the more narrow/single track conferences I attend.  IETF isn’t that though, it’s a lot of status updates and call for adoptions that should have lived on-list.  

Like most procrastinators, it’s the threat of a deadline (meeting) that often get us to complete the work (draft, slides) that could have been done previously.

- jared

---

From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 20:54:39 +0200

On May 12, 2019, at 15:23, Keith Moore <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> But we absolutely need to get out of the mode of assuming that IETF WG meetings consist mostly of presentations with a little bit of discussion squeezed in.   

Keith,

can you please explicitly shame the WGs where that happens?
(It appears that set is different from the set of WGs I attend.)

Grüße, Carsten

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 15:09:13 -0400

> (It appears that set is different from the set of WGs I attend.)

I've thought about doing so before, but (a) it wouldn't be a 
representative sample, and (b) the last thing I need is to make even 
more enemies in IETF.   But in my broad experience over the past several 
years (trying to get to one meeting per year since I'm generally not 
sponsored), more WG meetings than not have seemed to have this 
characteristic.

Note that by "presentation" I mean any session within a WG meeting 
that's largely occupied by having people look at things projected on a 
screen.   Discussion does happen between slides, but reading the slides 
takes up a lot of the time.

I assume that everyone is sincerely trying to get work done, but we're 
hampered by habit and precedent.

The very setup that exists in these rooms (theater seating, projection 
screen is the center of attention) is sleep-inducing.

Keith

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 May 2019 08:42:16 +1200

> sponsored), more WG meetings than not have seemed to have this 

But there's a problem. It's common for either the speaker or the chairs
to ask "How many people have read the draft?" and to see fewer than 10
hands go up. What's the speaker supposed to do except show her slides?
(Which normally have too many words to be useful.) So the problem is
a bit more basic, IMHO. It's not the slides that are the problem in
themselves. It's the fact of discussing drafts that haven't got people
interested enough to bother reading them.

Yet we need to get new ideas into discussion, before we can even start
a debate about running code and rough consensus.

In answer to Dave Täht, I'd like to note that the conjunction in that
phrase is "and", not "or". We really do need both. And we also need to get
out ahead of the market, which is the dilemma for something like homenet.
The age of routed home networks will come. Whether it comes with HNCP
and Babel remains to be seen.

Regards
    Brian

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 17:58:53 -0400

> I'm reminded of a sign that I once saw that said "Mediocrity is excellence at
    > pursuing the mean", and thinking "That must be the motto of <X>!"

    > (X was an organization in which I'd invested a lot of energy, and I thought
    > this because they were constantly comparing themselves with other similar
    > organizations both as a way of making decisions, and also as a way to
    > reassure themselves that they were "good enough")

    > Let's not make that IETF's motto.

I take your point.

    > I think it's possible that our attendance is small enough now, that we're on
    > the ragged edge now of having a wider choice of venues.   But I don't want to
    > discourage attendance!   I'd rather see if we can make the meetings a bit (a)
    > shorter, (b) less expensive (including both hotel and travel cost), and (c)
    > more productive for the money/time expenditure, thus a better value for those
    > footing the bill.

I also agree.
You and I have been around for similar lengths of time (compared to the mean;
you were a senior member when I joined), but over time you and I  have had
similar funding constraints.  You have attended many fewer meetings in the
last decade than I.

For me, this means:
  1) returning regularly to the same venues.  They don't have to be dirt cheap,
     but over time I/we learn how to spend less on accomodation, and know
     which other events/meetings are nearby to leverage travel costs.

  2) fewer parallel tracks === fewer conflicts ==> more informal/change/side meetings, which
     are exactly what in-person meetings excel at.

  3) we need to move the very valuable Hackathon into the week so that the
     overall duration is less.

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

---

From: Jared Mauch <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 18:11:35 -0400

> On May 12, 2019, at 4:42 PM, Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 

I think you mean what is the chair supposed to do. Perhaps they can limit discussions to those that read the drafts or viewed the slides. 

Can also hold an interim the month before meeting asking for those presentations to be shared to help run an efficient meeting in a month time. 

Minor process improvements here will go a long way.

---

From: Joel Jaeggli <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 15:27:00 -0700

> On May 10, 2019, at 07:00, Ted Lemon <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 

That's an odd definition of having never paid.  At the point of registration, you either provided a credit card or requested an invoice. The nominal cost of your involvement in the IETF borne on the part of you or your employer(s) is no doubt considerable, especially during your term on the IESG when the time commitment was also considerable..  

For most  of the 4 years I spent on the IESG I paid the costs of attending out of my own pocket. I did that, because it was what i signed up for, because it needed to get done and because I believed there was value in the work being done in the operations and management area.  Back as an individual contributor I come when I have something to do and some way to pay for it otherwise I wouldn't be there.

joel

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 18:30:49 -0400

> interested enough to bother reading them.

I think the two reinforce each other.

Many WGs seem to take on work too easily (sometimes because the group is 
chartered to encompass all of a certain kind of work, rather than trying 
to solve some particular problem).   And it's almost as if nobody wants 
to deny someone a chance to work on an RFC, so there's a tendency for 
lots of people to support WG adoption of a draft, and few willing to 
object.   The question posed in the meeting is usually "How many people 
are willing to work on this?" rather than "Is this draft worthy of this 
WG's precious resources?".   Then the group's face time is divided 
between lots of drafts, maybe several for which there isn't widespread 
interest.   (IMO IETF now publishes too many RFCs per year, and the 
relevance and quality suffer accordingly.)

And maybe when people attend a WG meeting and see lots of documents 
being discussed, without much support being required for any of them, it 
seems like there's always room for one more.

And there are sometimes many tourists at a meeting.   Overall I want to 
encourage tourists - we need more cross-area review, we're too siloed as 
it is.   But we shouldn't take up precious meeting time going through 
slides to accommodate them.   Sure, it's a lot of work to read all of 
the I-Ds for every WG meeting you drop into.   But maybe it's not 
unreasonable to expect those in the room to have read the slides in 
advance of the meeting.   And maybe those who haven't read the slides 
should participate "remotely" - watching the meeting from elsewhere in 
the venue. Then the real meeting rooms would be full of people who 
actually are invested in the group's work, and the discussion should be 
much more productive.

Keith

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 19:02:05 -0400

This is the precise distinction I was making. I didn’t pay. Someone paid, but not me. It’s amazing that you were willing to make it work out of pocket, but that’s just not scalable. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On May 12, 2019, at 6:27 PM, Joel Jaeggli <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> 
>

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 20:01:42 -0400

On 5/12/19 7:02 PM, Ted Lemon wrote:

> It’s amazing that you were willing to make it work out of pocket, but 
> that’s just not scalable.

Or maybe IETF has structured itself so that most serious participants 
require sponsorship.   If, on the other hand, IETF were structured in 
such a way as to accommodate self-paying contributors, it might scale.  
It would look different than it does now, but that would not necessarily 
be a Bad Thing.

(More likely, money to fund travel wouldn't be the scaling constraint - 
some other constraint would dominate - but it might still attract more 
contributors, and more diverse contributors.)

Keith

---

From: "Joel M. Halpern" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 20:09:20 -0400

People periodically suggest that the structure should be different to 
facilitate better participation by "another group" that we would like to 
have.

But simply saying "maybe a different structure would work" does not help 
anyone.  Without an actual alternative on the table there isn't even 
anything to discuss.

We have made changes to improve remote participation.  There are 
proposals to empower more participants in more ways.  In each case these 
are based on concrete proposals to address concrete problems.  Not "we 
can do better".

Yours,
Joel

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 20:16:37 -0400

So a fully-developed solution (or nearly so) must be proposed before 
there can be any discussion of the problem?

(And therefore the solution that's proposed must only respond to the 
views of one person or a small number of people?)

Keith

On 5/12/19 8:09 PM, Joel M. Halpern wrote:
> facilitate better participation by "another group" that we would like 
> to have.
>
> But simply saying "maybe a different structure would work" does not 
> help anyone.  Without an actual alternative on the table there isn't 
> even anything to discuss.
>
> proposals to empower more participants in more ways.  In each case 
> these are based on concrete proposals to address concrete problems.  
> Not "we can do better".

---

From: "Joel M. Halpern" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 20:53:02 -0400

No, a fully-developed solution is not necessary.  But something more 
than a plaintive "there has to be a better way".  Particularly from 
someone like you who has been through all of this multiple times before.

Yours,
Joel

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 17:02:51 -0800

> although the ISOC Fellowships seem to be on hold at the moment.

gaia is not an IETF working group - it is an IRSG research group,
and that is not a trivial distinction in terms of working methods
or deliverables.

On balance I think the increase in RG sessions during IETF
meetings is a very good thing but it has led to an increase
in this sort of confusion.

At any rate, as someone who's both self-funded and participated
remotely quite a bit, I don't think that the goal here is to get
more people to meetings, but rather to make sure that people who
are actually contributing have the ability to fully participate,
whatever form that takes (ignoring, for the moment, meeting
revenues).  Meetings are not conferences, they're working meetings.

I also don't know how to communicate more clearly than we have
been that the IETF is not a membership organization and there
is no voting - that's a related misunderstanding that just
doesn't seem to go away.

Melinda

-- 
Melinda Shore
[email-masked]

Software longa, hardware brevis

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 21:18:27 -0400

> someone like you who has been through all of this multiple times before. 

My purpose at the moment is to see how much interest/willingness there 
is to reconsider some of the habits we've accumulated.   If there's 
insufficient interest, there's no point in going further at this time.  [*]

Many years in IETF have taught me that pitching a proposal prematurely 
does harm, because it prejudices people against considering the proposal 
later when the circumstances are more favorable.

Keith

[*] But I have seen signs of hope recently in IETF.  People are trying 
some new ways of running groups, as well as more ambitious technical 
ideas, and there seems to be increased interest in making remote 
participation more effective.  So I'm cautiously encouraged.

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 May 2019 14:39:18 +1200

On 13-May-19 13:02, Melinda Shore wrote:
>>> As one example, the gaia wg had some really interesting speakers
>>> from poorer parts of the world that got there somehow, when it
>>> was first formed. How did that happen? Is it still happening?
> 
>> I don't know, but I suspect ISOC had a hand in it. Special
>> facilities for participants from developing countries are an
>> excellent thing, although the ISOC Fellowships seem to be on hold
>> at the moment.
> 
> gaia is not an IETF working group - it is an IRSG research group, and
> that is not a trivial distinction in terms of working methods or
> deliverables.

Nor in terms of motivations either. However, it seems relevant to
the question of whether the IETF should continue to do standards
track work *ahead* of the market, of which homenet is a current
example and IPv6 is a 25-year-old example. In the realm of counter-
factuals, imagine for a moment what might have happened if in 1994,
the IETF had said "Too soon, we'll just leave IPng aside for now;
those interested can take it to the IRTF."

> On balance I think the increase in RG sessions during IETF meetings
> is a very good thing but it has led to an increase in this sort of
> confusion.

Yes.

> remotely quite a bit, I don't think that the goal here is to get more
> people to meetings, but rather to make sure that people who are
> actually contributing have the ability to fully participate, whatever
> form that takes (ignoring, for the moment, meeting revenues).
> Meetings are not conferences, they're working meetings.

Correct. But if some people pay only in order to attend and learn,
without contributing, that's OK too. I certainly learn something
every time.

> I also don't know how to communicate more clearly than we have been
> that the IETF is not a membership organization and there is no voting
> - that's a related misunderstanding that just doesn't seem to go
> away.

Yes, but I can see that very occasional attendees will not see
much difference from a formal voting organisation, from the outside
looking in. We don't vote, but some voices seem to be heard better
than others.

Regards
    Brian

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 18:49:44 -0800

> those interested can take it to the IRTF."

Definitely.  Also, there are a couple of instances I can think
of in which mistiming work contributed to its failure but
were not the only reason for their failure (much of the
middlebox work, for example).

But all that aside, my reason for posting that gaia is a
research group rather than a working group is that presentations/
papers are common (and fully appropriate) in research groups while
they can be a misuse of valuable meeting time in working groups.

Melinda

-- 
Melinda Shore
[email-masked]

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 May 2019 23:19:23 -0400

> they can be a misuse of valuable meeting time in working groups.

+1

---

From: Stewart Bryant <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 May 2019 13:00:21 +0100

>> those interested can take it to the IRTF."

Unfortunately there is no such thing as "the market". Different 
stakeholders have different needs in terms of whether they need an RFC 
before they deploy.

- Stewart

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 08:28:55 +1200

> stakeholders have different needs in terms of whether they need an RFC 

Of course. But what goes into the mass market host operating systems
really matters. Again taking my 25 years old example, it matters that
Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android support dual stack IPv6. That didn't
happen because consumers asked for it.

   Brian

---

From: Stewart Bryant <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 08:20:20 +0100

> On 13 May 2019, at 21:28, Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 

Isn’t the modern world a bit different there. Apps talk to servers across an encrypted tunnel often terminated very close to the user. Inside the tunnel the entire eco system is provided to the app. So the only thing the app needs from the OS is the ability to send raw UDP packets, and the only thing it needs from the network is a UDP path to escape the internet.

Within the tunnel the protocol is a private matter between the app and the server and will be dictated by the server provider, or more strictly the server’s cloud provider. Technical domains  such as that are often the realm of industry consortia rather than SDOs.

This leaves the IETF with the transport net to the server point of presence and the Internet as the network of last resort.

Which more or less fits the model of IETF attendance.

Stewart

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 07:07:10 -0400

> Within the tunnel the protocol is a private matter between the app and the server and will be dictated by the server provider, or more strictly the server’s cloud provider. Technical domains  such…

While it is true that what is in the tunnel is in principle a private matter, in practice it’s mostly standard protocols that are used in these connections, because it’s better than reinventing the wheel, and there are better tools for debugging.   Of course in specialized cases we will see different behavior, but in general there’s an HTTPS connection, or something like that.   So in fact this use case does benefit from well-designed standards; indeed, when we see embarrassing security failures in apps, they almost always have to do with some failure or other of the app vendor to use available security mechanisms which were part of the ecosystem, but which they didn’t understand well enough to use correctly.

But setting that aside for a moment, the fact is that we can only do what we can do.   It’s true that there are some things that an SDO can’t reach.   And yet there are many things we can.   So figuring out how to do those well is still worthwhile.

---

From: "Pete Resnick" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 13:19:04 -0500

> WGs targeting WG adoption.

A lot of people say that a lot. I have never heard an adequate 
justification for it or any metrics to indicate that it is true.

pr
-- 
Pete Resnick http://www.episteme.net/
All connections to the world are tenuous at best

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 10:30:13 -0800

> justification for it or any metrics to indicate that it is true.

No, I haven't either, although I have to admit that I've only
rarely heard people make that particular assertion.  New work
needs discussion and I think we could benefit from helping
people figure out how to structure their session slots around
discussion rather than just presentation-followed-by-questions.
Just starting out with "here's what I think needs discussion
by the working group" might help, with the understanding that
the working group is the mailing list, not those present in
the meeting room.

Melinda

---

From: Mary B <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 13:43:36 -0500

So, I totally agree that WGs should not be run as conference sessions are
with complete and beautiful presentations.  But, I do think it's important
to consider our audience. AFAICT, those most against presentations are
those for whom English is a native language.  We know we have speakers that
talk really, really fast.  If I, as a native English speaker have problems
following them, I can't fathom how others can.  And, no I'm not suggesting
people read the slides (that's an awful mode of presentation), but having a
slide summarizing key points the speaker is trying to make goes a long way
IMHO.  I am a visual learner and I find pictures/diagrams to be super,
super helpful during discussions.  So, I do find that helpful for new
work.  In the WGs I attend, I haven't seen problems with the
presentations.    Some of us are just not so good at forming a complete
understanding of something in an auditory only mode.

IMHO, WG chairs have the authority and ability to suggest someone reduce
content in a presentation if they think it won't allow adequate discussion
time or it if has too much background material and doesn't focus on key
issues.

Regards,
Mary.

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 15:00:13 -0400

On May 14, 2019, at 2:43 PM, Mary B <[email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
> AFAICT, those most against presentations are those for whom English is a native language.  We know we have speakers that talk really, really fast.  If I, as a native English speaker have problems following them, I can't fathom how others can.

What this suggests to me is not that we should use more slides, in order to help non-native speakers, but rather that we should rely less on the spoken word.  It can be helpful to see peoples’ body language, so I don’t think we can completely eliminate the need for this, but what in-person meetings do best is to help people to come into agreement on contentious issues, and if this process excludes everyone who can’t keep up with rapid-fire english speech, then that’s going to be a problem, isn’t it?

---

From: Mary B <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 14:15:15 -0500

On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 2:00 PM Ted Lemon <[email-masked]> wrote:

> On May 14, 2019, at 2:43 PM, Mary B <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
> AFAICT, those most against presentations are those for whom English is a
> native language.  We know we have speakers that talk really, really fast.
> If I, as a native English speaker have problems following them, I can't
> fathom how others can.
>
>
> What this suggests to me is not that we should use more slides, in order
> to help non-native speakers, but rather that we should rely less on the
> spoken word.  It can be helpful to see peoples’ body language, so I don’t
> think we can completely eliminate the need for this, but what in-person
> meetings do best is to help people to come into agreement on contentious
> issues, and if this process excludes everyone who can’t keep up with
> rapid-fire english speech, then that’s going to be a problem, isn’t it?
>

[MB] I wasn't suggesting more slides, but there seems to be some folks in
these discussions that think we can do away with presentations altogether.
 I agree that the notion is to come to agreement on contentious issues.
One challenge is that everyone in the room doesn't have the same level of
understanding of the issue.  So, it's extremely important IMHO to make sure
the issue is well framed.  Some folks might find some of what's said
repetitive.  In reality, we could have WG sessions and get stuff done with
a fraction of the number of people in the room. But, if the notion is to be
more open and increase participation from new folks, we need to ensure that
what we do makes sense to the point that they can see how they might
contribute in the future.   [/MB]

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 15:20:56 -0400

On May 14, 2019, at 3:15 PM, Mary B <[email-masked]> wrote:
> [MB] I wasn't suggesting more slides, but there seems to be some folks in these discussions that think we can do away with presentations altogether.   I agree that the notion is to come to agreement on contentious issues.  One challenge is that everyone in the room doesn't have the same level of understanding of the issue.  So, it's extremely important IMHO to make sure the issue is well framed.  Some folks might find some of what's said repetitive.  In reality, we could have WG sessions and get stuff done with a fraction of the number of people in the room. But, if the notion is to be more open and increase participation from new folks, we need to ensure that what we do makes sense to the point that they can see how they might contribute in the future.   [/MB]

Perhaps, but effective communication comes from interaction,  not lecturing.   I’ve seen many presentations where an amazing amount of effort went into preparing the chart, and the effect of the presentation was to just confuse me more than I had been before it started.   Preparing a presentation so that it actually gets the point across is actually quite difficult.   We do see presentations of this type at the IETF, but they are more the exception than the rule.   If we really want to be more effective, this is another knob we could turn: training on effective presentation.

---

From: "John Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 14 May 2019 15:21:48 -0400

In article <[email-masked]> you write:
>> New work usually benefits from presentation, whether in BoFs or 
>> existing WGs targeting WG adoption.
>

It's not exactly a chicken and egg problem, but I can't count the
number of times a new topic comes up, the chair asks how many people
have read the draft, and approximately no hands go up.  It's often
hard to tell how much that's because people looked at the title and it
didn't look interesting, they missed it in the flood of I-Ds sent just
before the cutoff, or the room is full of tourists who don't read the
WG list.

It seems to me that the place for the presentation is on the WG list
in the weeks before the meeting to encourage people to read the draft
and think about the topic.  I don't have a strong opinion about how one
might make a presentation on a mailing list.  Send a link to the slides
with some teasers about their exciting contents, perhaps.

R's,
John

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 11:27:22 -0800

On 5/14/19 11:15 AM, Mary B wrote:
> But, if the notion is to be more open and increase
> participation from new folks, we need to ensure that what we do makes
> sense to the point that they can see how they might contribute in the
> future.   

I'm actually not sure that is the point.  I believe very strongly
that producing high-quality standards depends on participation from
across broad communities of interested parties but I'm not sure that
what happens in meetings is actually a barrier to participation, in
the same sense that, say, overdependence on meetings while having very
high meeting participation costs is (bringing this full circle).

Melinda

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 11:32:41 -0800

> with some teasers about their exciting contents, perhaps.

I feel pretty strongly about not giving meeting time to topics/
documents that have had no mailing list discussion prior to the
meeting[*].  It doesn't have to be elaborate but I do think authors
need to provide a pointer to a document along with a description
of the problem they're trying to solve (along with a description
of their proposed solution, if applicable).  If nothing else it's
a more reliable way to gauge interest across a broader and more
representative set of participants than polling the people who
happened to show up for a given working group session.

Melinda

* to be clear, IETF working groups are under discussion here, not
IRTF research groups.

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 16:40:50 -0400

On 5/14/19 2:43 PM, Mary B wrote:

> So, I totally agree that WGs should not be run as conference sessions 
> are with complete and beautiful presentations.  But, I do think it's 
> important to consider our audience. AFAICT, those most against 
> presentations are those for whom English is a native language.  We 
> know we have speakers that talk really, really fast.  If I, as a 
> native English speaker have problems following them, I can't fathom 
> how others can.  And, no I'm not suggesting people read the slides 
> (that's an awful mode of presentation), but having a slide summarizing 
> key points the speaker is trying to make goes a long way IMHO.  I am a 
> visual learner and I find pictures/diagrams to be super, super helpful 
> during discussions. So, I do find that helpful for new work.  In the 
> WGs I attend, I haven't seen problems with the presentations.    Some 
> of us are just not so good at forming a complete understanding of 
> something in an auditory only mode.

I'm a very enthusiastic supporter of people preparing slides in advance 
of a meeting, and making them available for download and/or remote 
viewing (ideally both) from the IETF web site.   I just don't think it's 
generally a good idea to spend valuable meeting time going through them 
slide-by-slide.

> IMHO, WG chairs have the authority and ability to suggest someone 
> reduce content in a presentation if they think it won't allow adequate 
> discussion time or it if has too much background material and doesn't 
> focus on key issues.

Yes, they do.   But there's a lot of inertia and mindshare around the 
current way of doing things, which is reinforced not only in IETF but in 
most of the organizations that people work for.   I doubt it serves 
those organizations well either, but it certainly doesn't work well in 
the IETF context, most of the time.

If we want to change how we conduct meetings, we need to build community 
support around a different way - or at least around empowering the 
chairs to conduct experiments - rather than expecting them to do it on 
their own initiative.   (And if we're going to conduct experiments we 
should try to capture the results somehow).

Keith

---

From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 16:29:11 -0500

> justification for it or any metrics to indicate that it is true.

I mean, you're trying to get people to sign on to review, and even
co-author.  I.e., you have to advertise your proposal.  How will you do
that if you don't get a chance to tell people about it?  Especially in a
BoF.

That said, I agree that the vast majority of _WG_ meeting time should be
reserved for resolving consensus issues (remembering always to confirm
on the list).

Nico
--

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 17:57:01 -0400

I think that WGs need to have virtual interims partway between meetings in
which to hold presentation-style events where the initial problem statement
is provided.  This accomodates the "need" to present, while not wasting
super-expensive meeting time.

This should be at least two weeks prior to draft cut-off date, such that
revisions and suggestions could go into a draft, and there could be some list
traffic about the document.

6tisch has had regular virtual interims and often new work would come up
there.  6tisch and ROLL often need really good pictures to explain things,
and that's what the slides are really good for.  Animated ones even better.

(ps: speaking as someone who has attended more than 50 meetings, more than
2/3 of them at my own consulting companies' expense, let me add: if attending
in person or is making or breaking your work, then you probably aren't
resourced well enough to do the work.  Internet-Drafts don't progress because
you attended a meeting or not, they progress because you spend dozens of days
worth of time reading/writing emails, and writing code.  And, our remote
attendance technology *is* rather good)

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 17:57:59 -0400

> that if you don't get a chance to tell people about it?  Especially in a

A good case can be made for presentations in BOFs.

It would also be useful if latecomers to a WG, and "tourists", could 
have a way to get up to speed.    If we had better ways of doing that, 
our standards might benefit from earlier review from a more diverse set 
of interests.   IETF Last Call is too late to fix much.

I have been wondering if it would be worth it for authors or WGs to 
publish "catch up" slides, or even to hold "catch up" sessions in 
advance of WG meetings, so that newcomers and tourists could contribute 
more effectively (less disruptively) if they chose to attend the WG 
sessions.

I also wonder if there might be a significant "market" for such sessions 
from the broader technical population, from people interested in what 
the future might hold.    Maybe there could be N days of "catch up" 
presentations and BOFs, followed by M days of working group sessions 
with NO presentations.  (As a first approximation, let N=2 and M=3, and 
tweak as necessary; put BOFs on the last of the N days.)   Most WG 
participants wouldn't need to attend the first N days (though some might 
want to see what's going on in other groups/areas), whereas those who 
just wanted an overview, wouldn't need to attend the last M days.

WGs not actually having working sessions at the meeting should still 
produce/update "catch up" presentations or at least update their 
slides.   Those attending WG working sessions and who weren't caught up 
on the mailing lists, would be expected to read the slides before 
attending.

All sessions should be remotely accessible for free, though in-person 
attendees will of course have more occasions for fine lunches and dinners.

Maybe there could also be some renumeration (or at least free 
registration) for those doing presentations, which could offset some of 
the meeting costs for active participants and enable a more diverse set 
of people to participate.    (We'd have to be careful, though, to not 
create perverse incentives.   Having people create proposals in the 
hopes of deriving money from presentations about those proposals might 
not be good for the Internet.   But free registration seems fairly 
low-risk as long as the conference makes enough money from additional 
attendance to offset the cost of those attending for free.)

Keith

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 18:04:54 -0400

> It would also be useful if latecomers to a WG, and "tourists", could have a
    > way to get up to speed.    If we had better ways of doing that, our standards
    > might benefit from earlier review from a more diverse set of interests.  
    > IETF Last Call is too late to fix much.

    > I have been wondering if it would be worth it for authors or WGs to publish
    > "catch up" slides, or even to hold "catch up" sessions in advance of WG
    > meetings, so that newcomers and tourists could contribute more effectively
    > (less disruptively) if they chose to attend the WG sessions.

Yes.  It's also soemtimes hard to find the BOF slides because the WG goes
ahead with a different name.  Those BOF slides often contain very good
problem statements, some really useful diagrams, etc..
It would be good if step one of forming a WG was to post all the BOF
materials to the WG clearly identified as such.   PDF copies, but also the
editable version because future people will want to do variations as they
progress.

    > I also wonder if there might be a significant "market" for such sessions from
    > the broader technical population, from people interested in what the future
    > might hold.    Maybe there could be N days of "catch up" presentations and
    > BOFs, followed by M days of working group sessions with NO presentations. 
    > (As a first approximation, let N=2 and M=3, and tweak as necessary; put BOFs
    > on the last of the N days.)   Most WG participants wouldn't need to attend
    > the first N days (though some might want to see what's going on in other
    > groups/areas), whereas those who just wanted an overview, wouldn't need to
    > attend the last M days.

This would be very interesting.

    > Maybe there could also be some renumeration (or at least free registration)
    > for those doing presentations, which could offset some of the meeting costs
    > for active participants and enable a more diverse set of people to

Or maybe just a cut of the youtube revenue :-)

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 18:12:09 -0400

> and that's what the slides are really good for.  Animated ones even better.

Lest it seem otherwise because I just posted a message about 
face-to-face "catch up" sessions, I also think some "virtual" version of 
such sessions is worth considering.   I do think there needs to be a 
clear distinction between "educational/presentation" meetings and 
"working" meetings, whether physical or virtual.

> resourced well enough to do the work.

I'd say it depends on the work you're doing.   Some kinds of useful work 
can be done at a snail's pace.   Other work is not useful if it's not 
finished quickly because it will have been overtaken by events (and IETF 
is often too slow).

But I'm also seeing problems that I recognized 20+ years ago that are 
only beginning to be addressed now, so I don't think it's appropriate 
for IETF to presume that everything useful must be done quickly.

> Internet-Drafts don't progress because
> worth of time reading/writing emails, and writing code.

In my experience, both are often necessary.   There have been a few 
useful and successful contributions made entirely or mostly by remote 
participants.  But other things being equal, people seem to take you 
more seriously if you show up in person.

Keith

---

From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 17:55:19 -0500

On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 11:32:41AM -0800, Melinda Shore wrote:
> [...]

In the context of a BoF, that's almost of necessity true by the time the
BoF meets, at least as to proponents of the BoF.  Otherwise the BoF
wouldn't even be scheduled.

For proponents asking that a WG adopt some new work (or re-charter so
that it can adopt the new work), it is also almost always the case that
the work has been discussed on the list, as the WG chairs would be
remiss to schedule any discussion of new work at a meeting that was not
discussed on the list.

Thus I feel this thread is a bit much ado about not much unless there
are WG chairs making bad agenda decisions.

Nico
--

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 10:56:11 +1200

On 15-May-19 10:04, Michael Richardson wrote:
...
 
> editable version because future people will want to do variations as they

There's a way to do this for minimal effort, which is to post a link to the BOF proceedings in the WG wiki. We did that for Anima: https://trac.ietf.org/trac/anima/wiki -> Prechartering History

(The on-line proceedings for IETF 90 seem to be partly broken, however, so the slides are in fact hard to find. I will report that to the appropriate authority.)

   Brian

---

From: Aaron Falk <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 10:27:22 -0400

> traffic about the document.

This is an intriguing proposal.  As a wg chair, I can see the utility of 
having a virtual interim to present a new draft or topic for the wg 
before making a decision on whether to put it on the agenda.  If you did 
it early enough, it might inform wg conflicts and event IETF attendance. 
  A side benefit is that interim agendas are broadly announced and may 
reach folks who are not otherwise tracking the wg.  I think I’ll try 
this in the TAPS wg the next time a new topic comes up.

--aaron

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 14:07:20 -0400

Aaron Falk <[email-masked]> wrote:
    > having a virtual interim to present a new draft or topic for the wg before
    > making a decision on whether to put it on the agenda. If you did it early
    > enough, it might inform wg conflicts and event IETF attendance. A side
    > benefit is that interim agendas are broadly announced and may reach folks who
    > are not otherwise tracking the wg. I think I’ll try this in the TAPS wg the
    > next time a new topic comes up.

Further thoughts...  in order to socialize this better, it would be good if
we followed some kind of semi-common process.  This might mean:

1) at IETF(n-1), the chair slides might say:
   a) deadline for considering new documents is DATE(IETF(n) - 8 weeks)

   b) a virtual interim meeting about said documents will occur during the
      week of DATE(IETF(n)-6 weeks). [Exact day/time TBD, Meeting will be
      recorded]

2) WG chair collects requests to consider adoption, notifies the ML, and
   schedules a virtual interim meeting.

3) virtual interim occurs, with any oral questions being captured into an
   email minutes to the list.  Possibly one email per major question.
   This naturally generates ML traffic if there is interest.

4) if there is much excitement, then the WG could start an adoption call, and
   the document could become a WG document before IETF(n)!
   This also means that we get a really good introduction presentation,
   not constrained by end-of-WG meeting, here is "3minutes" talk fast..

Is this worth an RFC3999 ID?

---

From: Aaron Falk <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 14:24:43 -0400

>       week of DATE(IETF(n)-6 weeks). [Exact day/time TBD, Meeting will 

Maybe multiple interims depending on demand?

>    This naturally generates ML traffic if there is interest.

The discussion of handling questions seems overly proscribed.  I’d 
rather experiment a bit.

>    not constrained by end-of-WG meeting, here is "3minutes" talk 

‘zactly.

> Is this worth an RFC3999 ID?

I think you mean RFC3933.  I’d rather have some running code first.  
AFAICT, there’s nothing in our process BCPs that prohibit was from 
just doing this.

--aaron

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 14:39:44 -0400

Aaron Falk <[email-masked]> wrote:
    mcr> b) a virtual interim meeting about said documents will occur during the
    mcr> week of DATE(IETF(n)-6 weeks). [Exact day/time TBD, Meeting will be
    mcr> recorded]

    > Maybe multiple interims depending on demand?

yes, I think that's a place for some experimentation.
Fewer meetings are easier to schedule, but lead to less time.
More meetings accomodate disparate audiences easier, but that means it also
would tend to loose people who would exclude themselves because they aren't
interested (and may actually be reasonably critical).

    > schedules a virtual interim meeting.

    mcr> 3) virtual interim occurs, with any oral questions being captured into an
    mcr> email minutes to the list. Possibly one email per major question.
    mcr> This naturally generates ML traffic if there is interest.

    > The discussion of handling questions seems overly proscribed. I’d rather
    > experiment a bit.

Sure.  My idea is to stoke the list.
I've had authors ask me how to generate interest on the list, and the best
way is with questions.  I've suggest that authors ask each other questions on
the list :-)

    > I think you mean RFC3933. I’d rather have some running code first. AFAICT,
    > there’s nothing in our process BCPs that prohibit was from just doing this.

Yes, 3933. (3^3=9..) exactly.

---

From: Aaron Falk <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 14:42:39 -0400

> way is with questions.  I've suggest that authors ask each other 

That’s a good strategy.  Another one is to provide an egregiously bad 
summary and let folks correct you.   Of course, this approach has some 
risks...  ;)

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 15:18:33 -0400

To this I'd add:

  * The "virtual interim" meeting announcement should make it clear (in
    the subject line as well as the text) that it's for the specific
    purpose of reviewing proposed new work for potential adoption by the
    WG.  (I assume these announcements go to the IETF announce list like
    any other meeting announcements, but it's easy for things to get
    lost in the noise.)

  * There should be some way of evaluating this experiment to see how
    well it works (for both WG members and others).  e.g. run a survey
    of both WG list members and participants and see how well it worked
    for them.   (Two things I will wonder are whether these meetings
    were productive for those who attended, and also whether the
    meetings were sufficiently visible and accessible for those who
    didn't attend.)

Keith

---

From: Mikael Abrahamsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 21:23:55 +0200 (CEST)

> super-expensive meeting time.

This seems like a good idea. However, I find that the in-person mic line 
format of "discussions" isn't a great way to actually discuss things. Very 
few people get up to the mic, there is the language barrier for a 
non-trivial amount of attendees, and very few people (or the total in the 
room) actually step up to ask questions. This is of course different in 
different WGs, the span of different ways of doing things is substantial.

So let's take a step back and ask what the presentation of a draft 
actually adds. I believe it's the overview format of creating a slide deck 
that present the introduction to the draft that gives this added overview 
of what the draft is trying to achieve, and then people can decide what it 
is they are interested in.

These interims, they by their nature means people all across the globe 
need to participate at the same time. This is a strain on some people 
regardless of when on the 24 hour clock it is. So perhaps instead if each 
draft author who wants a slot on the WG agenda has to create a standalone 
slide deck that sums up the meat of the draft in 5-10 slides together with 
the intro/abstract of the draft (which then by virtue of need of gathering 
attention has to actually sum up the draft properly), and then there is a 
non-synchronised "virtual interim" that is a one week review period and 
then people have to "upvote" or similar if they think the draft makes 
sense to bring on the agenda. This would involve developing new systems 
but shouldn't be too complicated.

It would perhaps be even better if there was more focus and perhaps 
even "draft interims" where there were sessions scheduled to have 
real-time discussions about a specific draft, if there was enough 
interest.

Personally I still think the mailing list format of review and discussions 
are generally the best, but I've been told there are others who do not 
agree. So... the ones who think that this isn't great, would any of the 
above make more sense to you?

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: [email-masked]

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 15:39:57 -0400

Keith Moore <[email-masked]> wrote:
    > * There should be some way of evaluating this experiment to see how well it
    > works (for both WG members and others). e.g. run a survey of both WG list
    > members and participants and see how well it worked for them. (Two things I
    > will wonder are whether these meetings were productive for those who
    > attended, and also whether the meetings were sufficiently visible and
    > accessible for those who didn't attend.)

That implies we have to work out what the goals are.
Let me take a stab at this:

1) make it easier to bring new work to the IETF.
2) permit deeper and faster review of the new work, providing better
   feedback.
3) reduce presentations from costly in-person meetings

It would be nice to have a before/after analysis.  A key metric I'd want to
have is time between individual-00 draft and adoptedwg-00 document.
A different metric would be how many non-authors are engaged prior to
and during adoption call.

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 15:44:24 -0400

Mikael Abrahamsson <[email-masked]> wrote:
    > These interims, they by their nature means people all across the globe need
    > to participate at the same time. This is a strain on some people regardless
    > of when on the 24 hour clock it is. So perhaps instead if each draft author
    > who wants a slot on the WG agenda has to create a standalone slide deck that
    > sums up the meat of the draft in 5-10 slides together with the intro/abstract
    > of the draft (which then by virtue of need of gathering attention has

This reminds me of poster-presentations at scientific fora.
Let me suggest that the preperation and then recording of the virtual interim
meeting essentially is creating what you want.  Nobody needs to attend in
real time, they can easily watch it later.

    > actually sum up the draft properly), and then there is a non-synchronised
    > "virtual interim" that is a one week review period and then people have to
    > "upvote" or similar if they think the draft makes sense to bring on the
    > agenda. This would involve developing new systems but shouldn't be too
    > complicated.

I do like having the up-vote on the DT rather than the +1 on the list.

    > It would perhaps be even better if there was more focus and perhaps even
    > "draft interims" where there were sessions scheduled to have real-time
    > discussions about a specific draft, if there was enough interest.

yes... we actually do this pretty well already.
Design teams often announce their work schedule, and it is also the case that
even with informal author teams, I/we invite frequent contributors to help.
But, those sessions scale to 4-5 people and a shared editor.

    > agree. So... the ones who think that this isn't great, would any of the above
    > make more sense to you?

I'm starting to wonder if we need an email-101 tutorial for newcomers.

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 15:48:20 -0400

On 5/15/19 3:23 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:

>
> This seems like a good idea. However, I find that the in-person mic 
> line format of "discussions" isn't a great way to actually discuss 
> things. Very few people get up to the mic, there is the language 
> barrier for a non-trivial amount of attendees, and very few people (or 
> the total in the room) actually step up to ask questions. This is of 
> course different in different WGs, the span of different ways of doing 
> things is substantial.
>
> actually adds. I believe it's the overview format of creating a slide 
> deck that present the introduction to the draft that gives this added 
> overview of what the draft is trying to achieve, and then people can 
> decide what it is they are interested in.

yes.

> regardless of when on the 24 hour clock it is. So perhaps instead if 
> each draft author who wants a slot on the WG agenda has to create a 
> standalone slide deck that sums up the meat of the draft in 5-10 
> slides together with the intro/abstract of the draft (which then by 
> virtue of need of gathering attention has to actually sum up the draft 
> properly), and then there is a non-synchronised "virtual interim" that 
> is a one week review period and then people have to "upvote" or 
> similar if they think the draft makes sense to bring on the agenda. 
> This would involve developing new systems but shouldn't be too 
> complicated.

+1

Keith

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 16:00:44 -0400

> I'm starting to wonder if we need an email-101 tutorial for newcomers.

Maybe.   There are specific practices and etiquette for effective use of 
email that I suspect originated in ARPAnet days, and some of which may 
have been influenced by Usenet, but are not always known to more recent 
participants.

Examples are: quoting the subject message in a reply and putting 
responses inline rather than at top or bottom, judicious trimming of 
quoted portions of a subject message in replies, changing the subject 
line when appropriate, start replying privately when the discussion gets 
heated (with a notation to that effect in the message body), the pros 
and cons of cross-posting to multiple lists, "reply all" vs. "reply to 
list", and more recently, the "+1" convention.   It might be a useful 
exercise to try to document some of these things.

Keith

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 May 2019 09:00:22 +1200

...
> I'm starting to wonder if we need an email-101 tutorial for newcomers.

Not just for newcomers?

I find life is progressively harder as people's email habits drift in
different directions. Just elementary things like flowed vs unflowed
text. Various methods of quoting text. People who seem to regard
HTML as the normal format. Use of colour, which doesn't work in the
plain text variant.

Apart from the mechanics, there is indeed etiquette, but deeper issues
(like using simple English, avoiding slang and idioms), failing to
change the Subject when the subject changes, and knowing when to
shut up (which I will now do).

    Brian

---

From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 16:34:15 -0500

+1

+1

> 3) reduce presentations from costly in-person meetings

+1 (Except, again, for BoFs, because they are very much about marketing
    new work, and they can't be expected to have a virtual interim.

    And, of course, SAAG should continue to have one presentation.)

> and during adoption call.

It will take at least a year to demonstrate that your proposals improve
these metrics.  I'm OK with that.

Nico
--

---

From: Greg Skinner <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 14:45:19 -0700

> On May 15, 2019, at 1:00 PM, Keith Moore <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> Maybe.   There are specific practices and etiquette for effective use of email that I suspect originated in ARPAnet days, and some of which may have been influenced by Usenet, but are not always known to more recent participants.
> 
> Examples are: quoting the subject message in a reply and putting responses inline rather than at top or bottom, judicious trimming of quoted portions of a subject message in replies, changing the subject line when appropriate, start replying privately when the discussion gets heated (with a notation to that effect in the message body), the pros and cons of cross-posting to multiple lists, "reply all" vs. "reply to list", and more recently, the "+1" convention.   It might be a useful exercise to try to document some of these things.
> 
> Keith

Back in the day, the Responsible Use of the Network (run) WG addressed netiquette, among other things.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/run/about/ <https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/run/about/>

(BTW, the archive is at ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf-mail-archive/run/ <ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf-mail-archive/run/> .)

—gregbo

---

From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 16:46:17 -0500

On Wed, May 15, 2019 at 04:00:44PM -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
> Maybe.  There are specific practices and etiquette for effective use
> of email that I suspect originated in ARPAnet days, and some of which
> may have been influenced by Usenet, but are not always known to more
> recent participants.

Anyone using BUI/GUI MUAs will generally have trouble with proper e-mail
etiquette.  Some BUI/GUI MUAs at least give you the option or even
default to something close to angle bracket quoting...

...but one MUA whose name is cursed defaults to top-posting w/o angle
bracket quoting and makes it really difficult to enable angle bracket
quoting, and then makes it really difficult to use that correctly.  The
vendor of that cursed MUA has been improving lots of things in their
stack enormously of late -- they're doing impressive work.  Maybe, just
maybe, someone there will find it possible to remediate that cursed MUA.

That one MUA has made e-mail poison, made it more IM-like without being
IM.

Nico
--

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 17:53:23 -0400

>      new work, and they can't be expected to have a virtual interim.

I was wondering if similar virtual interim meetings, except associated 
with an area instead of a WG, could replace BOFs entirely.

If a virtual interim meeting is not adequate to "market new work", (I 
assume you mean it's not sufficiently visible for such a purpose), maybe 
we should figure out how to make interim meetings more visible.   I'm 
starting to get the impression that "interim" meetings are the future of 
IETF.

Keith

p.s. I went looking on the ietf web site for a calendar of online 
interim meetings and noticed that while it does exist, it's buried very 
deeply in the site.   Maybe it should be on the home page, or on a 
special home page for IETF attendees.   And maybe it should be presented 
like a calendar rather than (or in addition to) as a list.

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 17:55:30 -0400

> https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/run/about/

    > (BTW, the archive is at ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf-mail-archive/run/ .)

RFC1855 is indeed useful.
I once looked for one of the Internet-101 guides that were popular in
universities in the 1990s, but I never found a useful copy.  I once
found a badly scanned copy of a printed manual! So bad I didn't use it.

---

From: "Salz, Rich" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 21:58:29 +0000

Since most of the world now uses things like this, perhaps it is time to re-evaluate what "proper email etiquette" means.

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 17:59:16 -0400

> That one MUA has made e-mail poison, made it more IM-like without being

Part of the advice might need to be "use a different MUA for IETF work".

Keith

p.s. The failure so far to find a good way of annotating text in HTML 
actually illustrates a deep underlying flaw in the SGML/XML/HTML model 
of text - annotated text is not hierarchically structured (even if the 
subject text is, which is by no means certain) and Procrustean attempts 
to annotated text into a tree-structured model are somewhere between 
needlessly complex or doomed to failure.

---

From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 17:08:13 -0500

On Wed, May 15, 2019 at 09:58:29PM +0000, Salz, Rich wrote:
> Since most of the world now uses things like this, perhaps it is time
> to re-evaluate what "proper email etiquette" means.

a) when I do, I manage,
b) maybe we can ask the vendor to help.

---

From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 17:09:35 -0500

+1

> actually illustrates a deep underlying flaw in the SGML/XML/HTML model of
> text - annotated text is not hierarchically structured (even if the subject
> text is, which is by no means certain) and Procrustean attempts to annotated
> text into a tree-structured model are somewhere between needlessly complex
> or doomed to failure.

Yes, no HTML for IETF email work.

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 18:10:43 -0400

On May 15, 2019, at 5:53 PM, Keith Moore <[email-masked]> wrote:
> p.s. I went looking on the ietf web site for a calendar of online interim meetings and noticed that while it does exist, it's buried very deeply in the site.   Maybe it should be on the home page, or on a special home page for IETF attendees.   And maybe it should be presented like a calendar rather than (or in addition to) as a list.

This would indeed be a useful innovation.

---

From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 17:14:06 -0500

On Wed, May 15, 2019 at 05:53:23PM -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
> I was wondering if similar virtual interim meetings, except associated with
> an area instead of a WG, could replace BOFs entirely.

Maybe, but having been involved in creating two WGs, one of which had a
contentious BoF, I do feel that the energy of the crowd is helpful.

I would be OK with having a virtual BoF as something of an inception
review, specifically so directorates could provide early inception
review.  But losing physical BoFs altogether strikes me as a loss, not a
win.

> If a virtual interim meeting is not adequate to "market new work", (I assume
> you mean it's not sufficiently visible for such a purpose), maybe we should
> figure out how to make interim meetings more visible.   I'm starting to get
> the impression that "interim" meetings are the future of IETF.

As long as we don't end up with basic IETF participation becoming a
full-time job description.

Nico
--

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 18:15:11 -0400

> Yes, no HTML for IETF email work.

The practical consequence of which might "everybody who wants to 
participate in IETF should use a different (approved) MUA for IETF work".

I don't like it, but maybe we need to find a way to let people use 
modern/broken MUAs.

But it's certainly fair to recognize that email is becoming 
more-and-more broken all the time as various vendors decide to make 
arbitrary changes to how they construct sent emails and/or present 
received emails.

(resisting the temptation to add a litany of heinous practices here)

Keith

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 18:26:48 -0400

> The practical consequence of which might "everybody who wants to participate in IETF should use a different (approved) MUA for IETF work".

Slight nit here: doing text markup by email is just a really bad idea and we shouldn’t.   We really ought to stop arguing about MUAs and just use the one we have, because we have no control over the MUAs people use, and we can’t agree on what the right model is anyway.

However, we could have better tooling for doing document markup.   E.g., Google Docs has a suggesting mode, where I can go in and edit a document, and you see my edits as suggestions that can be either accepted or deleted.   Inventing a new tool for doing this is probably too much work for the IETF to be doing, but this is a much better way to do document markup.

The question is, how to tie it to the mailing list discussion in a way that is useful and understandable?   A bog stupid option is to just use diff(1): edit the XML, and send us a diff.   Would be nice if the diff could be annotated, and I think it can.   Why don’t we do this?   We’d have to make sure the MUA didn’t mangle the diff, but I think that’s a tractable problem.

---

From: Mary B <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 17:40:00 -0500

That model is effectively what we've done with DISPATCH WG that started in
RAI area over 10 years ago.  For us, I think it made a big difference. I've
been meaning to run stats, but we've opened and more importantly completed
work in a number of WGs than we had in the past with SIPPING WG,  and we
progressed a number of things that had narrow interest as AD sponsored.
After IETF-103 and before IETF-104, we got a new WG chartered.  It does
take longer to get things going in cases where we have folks new to IETF.
In general, we've not had long presentations and always try to give enough
time on the agenda for discussion, as that is the focus.  We also have
earlier deadlines for topics to allow time for discussion on the mailing
list, so that the focus of discussions can be on issues and points raised
on the mailing list.  There's nothing to preclude any WG from not allowing
agenda time for something that hasn't had any discussion on the mailing
list.  Or, put those last on the agenda as time allows.

Personally, I think DISPATCH has worked well because when we charter WGs,
they have a very tight scope.  That may not be appropriate for all
areas/WGs, although, I think it's a good objective.

I also think (as usual) we're overthinking this.  Chairs have a lot of
leverage to optimize how they run their WGs. When I chaired the CLUE WG, we
had weekly (or maybe bi-weekly) calls to focus on specific issues.  We made
a lot more progress in the WG with that model.  We didn't do those as
interims - they were just design team calls that were announced on the
mailing list with minutes posted and issues tracked.

Regards,
Mary

On Wed, May 15, 2019 at 2:40 PM Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
wrote:

> well it

---

From: "Salz, Rich" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 22:40:25 +0000

>    Yes, no HTML for IETF email work.
    
Good.  Tell me how to configure gmail, yahoo, etc., to do that.

---

From: "Joel M. Halpern" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 18:53:08 -0400

First, new work comes in at different phases, not just in the BoF.
Second, when new work comes in, it is not obvious to folks that they are 
interested in it.  Thus, they are less likely to make time to attend 
virtual interims (or, even worse, actual interims)
Third, due to the nature of time zones, it is VERY hard to actually find 
a time when all the folks can make it.  Particularly when you do not 
know who the interested parties are, as they have not yet had a chance 
to see the work and discover they are (or are not) interested.

Yes, this means that sometimes we sometimes use WG face-to-face time to 
let folsk with new ideas know that their new idea has lots of problems 
or is not of interest.  That is not, in my book, a waste of time.

Yours,
Joel

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 23:18:55 +0000

> 3) reduce presentations from costly in-person meetings

I am not a fan of making this overly formal, either now,
during an experimental phase, or if it becomes institutionalized
in the future.  That said, I think some clarity around what's
intended seems critical and documenting goals would be the
core piece of that.  These three seem to me to capture what
I'm concerned about, myself (although I might edit the third
to say "reduce presentations during costly in-person meetings,
freeing up time and other resources for increased discussion"

Melinda

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 23:21:24 +0000

>     new work, and they can't be expected to have a virtual interim.

Right, except that there's no reason they can't have a call.

It strikes me that we tend to be driven by deadlines, and for
that reason having interims/virtual meetings/whatever might be
very effective for moving new work forward (rather than relying
on free-form mailing list discussions).

Melinda

---

From: "John Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 15 May 2019 20:45:08 -0400

It's easy.  Just use them.  Even cruddy old MUAs like my fave Alpine
can render any of the highly formatted stuff that is so popular these
days.

R's,
John

>I don't like it, but maybe we need to find a way to let people use 

PS: top-posting is a courtesy to people who read their mail on phones
with small screens at least some of the time, which these days is just
about everyone.

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 21:07:08 -0400

Keith Moore <[email-masked]> wrote:
    > site. Maybe it should be on the home page, or on a special home page for IETF
    > attendees. And maybe it should be presented like a calendar rather than (or
    > in addition to) as a list.

Do you mean:
  https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/upcoming.ics

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 21:08:42 -0400

Joel M. Halpern <[email-masked]> wrote:
    > interested in it.  Thus, they are less likely to make time to attend virtual
    > interims (or, even worse, actual interims)

    > Third, due to the nature of time zones, it is VERY hard to actually find a
    > time when all the folks can make it.  Particularly when you do not know who
    > the interested parties are, as they have not yet had a chance to see the work
    > and discover they are (or are not) interested.

Exactly.
I go to BOFs to be sure that I'm not interested in the work.
(Sometimes, such as CACOA... I'm wrong...)
Work that I'm interested in usually finds me :-)

---

From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 20:23:20 -0500

> Good.  Tell me how to configure gmail, yahoo, etc., to do that.

I forget how to, but gmail has a way.  I don't know about the others.
Frankly, I get very little HTML email from IETF lists, so I don't think
this is the problem.

The biggest problem is users who can't do angle bracket quoting so often
they do no quoting and then intersperse commentary in the form of lines
that start with "[sender's-name-here] ", and these are just very
difficult to read -- I try to avoid having to read them by reading
replies to them if there are any.  Such posts are unreadable no matter
what MUA you have, and that has nothing to do with HTML.

Nico
--

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 21:27:17 -0400

> in the future.

So no rfc3933 document need... what level of formalism would you like?

    > That said, I think some clarity around what's

I think that's a friendly amendment.
But, I'm not sure what document is amending yet.

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 21:33:53 -0400

On 5/15/19 6:26 PM, Ted Lemon wrote:

> Slight nit here: doing text markup by email is just a really bad idea and we shouldn’t.

Assuming by "doing text markup" you mean "transmitting incremental 
changes to a document over text email bodies", I see your point even 
though I don't entirely agree.    I think it works ok for small changes 
even though a bit cumbersome for larger ones.  Second, one advantage of 
doing everything over email is that there's a record of everything in 
one place, in a standard format, with all of the various contributions' 
authors, dates, and text recorded.

  We really ought to stop arguing about MUAs and just use the one we have, because we have no control over the MUAs people use, and we can’t agree on what the right model is anyway.

I see your point here also, but it's hard to deny that MUAs keep getting 
worse.   Even if "just use the one we have" works today (which is 
debatable), there's little reason to believe it will continue to work in 
the future.

> However, we could have better tooling for doing document markup.   E.g., Google Docs has a suggesting mode, where I can go in and edit a document, and you see my edits as suggestions that can be ei…

Another advantage of doing everything over email is that it doesn't lend 
itself to spying on participants nearly as much as pretty much every web 
application that is operated by a commercial endeavor.

So yeah, IETF producing better tooling might be something we should 
consider.   We can't trust any of the major commercial players in this 
space.

> The question is, how to tie it to the mailing list discussion in a way that is useful and understandable?   A bog stupid option is to just use diff(1): edit the XML, and send us a diff.   Would be…

So basically require most contributors to use more tools that they don't 
regularly use (xml2rfc is bad enough already), just so they can avoid 
using email?   Not sure that's a step forward.

But there may still be some room to write a portable app that works as a 
plugin for most MUAs.   Not sure what to do about people using web 
clients or mobile platforms, though.

Keith

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 21:40:00 -0400

> with small screens at least some of the time, which these days is just

Ah, thanks for mentioning that.   There's such a thing as "-----berry 
disease" which is the inability of people to comprehend text sent over 
email that's more than a couple of sentences long.   (First observed of 
people using -----berry phones, though these days it applies to most 
mobile platforms.) Suffice it to say that widespread use of mobile 
phones is another thing that impairs all technical discussion over 
email, certainly including IETF work.

Best thing to do (as far as I can tell) is have a separate mailbox for 
IETF work and other technical discussion, and don't configure your phone 
to check it.   (Flagging and refiling messages that need more attention 
can also work, but this requires more discipline).

Keith

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 21:41:54 -0400

>    https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/upcoming.ics

no, I mean something that is useful in a web browser.

(I don't object to an iCalendar feed in addition to an HTML view, but 
both of them probably at least needs to be federated by area)

Keith

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 22:02:35 -0400

It’s really easy to offer changes in email. The problem is that it’s a discouraging amount of work to manage them if there are a significant number of them. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On May 15, 2019, at 9:33 PM, Keith Moore <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> Assuming by "doing text markup" you mean "transmitting incremental changes to a document over text email bodies", I see your point even though I don't entirely agree.    I think it works ok for small changes even though a bit cumbersome for larger ones.  Second, one advantage of doing everything over email is that there's a record of everything in one place, in a standard format, with all of the various contributions' authors, dates, and text recorded.
> 
> I see your point here also, but it's hard to deny that MUAs keep getting worse.   Even if "just use the one we have" works today (which is debatable), there's little reason to believe it will continue to work in the future.
> 
> Another advantage of doing everything over email is that it doesn't lend itself to spying on participants nearly as much as pretty much every web application that is operated by a commercial endeavor.
> 
> So yeah, IETF producing better tooling might be something we should consider.   We can't trust any of the major commercial players in this space.
> 
> So basically require most contributors to use more tools that they don't regularly use (xml2rfc is bad enough already), just so they can avoid using email?   Not sure that's a step forward.
> 
> But there may still be some room to write a portable app that works as a plugin for most MUAs.   Not sure what to do about people using web clients or mobile platforms, though.
> 
> Keith
> 
>

---

From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 21:03:50 -0500

> on free-form mailing list discussions).

I'd agree, but social dynamics are important.  I think for a _BoF_ ones
needs a physical meeting.  IMO it's risky to demand no presentations at
physical BoFs until we know that virtual BoFs work well (the risk being
that new work dries up).

Perhaps we could just as easily generate interest in new work via
virtual BoFs as with physical ones.  But if the only reason for having
virtual BoFs is to avoid having presentations in a physical BoF, then I
think we should first demonstrate that virtual BoFs work.

Nico
--

---

From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 May 2019 21:10:54 -0500

On Wed, May 15, 2019 at 06:26:48PM -0400, Ted Lemon wrote:
> However, we could have better tooling for doing document markup.
> E.g., Google Docs has a suggesting mode, where I can go in and edit a
> document, and you see my edits as suggestions that can be either
> accepted or deleted.   Inventing a new tool for doing this is probably
> too much work for the IETF to be doing, but this is a much better way
> to do document markup.

Better tools for OLD/NEW text suggestions would be nice.

I remember Stephen Kent using PDFs to share commentary.  That was
particularly difficult to use, oddly.  Git* hosting services might work
better, especially if authors commit .txt and/or .unpg renderings along
with .xml sources and .html renderings, provided there's enough archival
functionality.

> The question is, how to tie it to the mailing list discussion in a way
> that is useful and understandable?   A bog stupid option is to just
> use diff(1): edit the XML, and send us a diff.   Would be nice if the

I think it unlikely that reviewers will do this.  They might be more
inclined to edit unpaginated text renderings of the XML (I would be).

> diff could be annotated, and I think it can.   Why don’t we do this?

Because it's difficult to intersperse commentary with suggested edits
unless you do all of it in the latter form?

> We’d have to make sure the MUA didn’t mangle the diff, but I think
> that’s a tractable problem.

Well, if you expect XML diffs, then you expect a PR.

Maybe we should just move wholesale to Git* hosting services.  I, for
one, would consider that a loss.  I recently had to collate code review
commentary from a large code review on GitHub, and it was unpleasant --
I resorted to saving all the e-mails in an mbox and editing that, though
perhaps I should have just built tooling aroun the GitHub API.

E-mail has warts, but decades since the first RFCs, it mostly still
works for us.

Nico
--

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 May 2019 01:49:23 -0400

> First, new work comes in at different phases, not just in the BoF.

Yeah, I think we were talking about two ways of introducing new work - 
virtual interim meetings and virtual BoFs.  I'd expect them to be 
similar to one another, but not entirely identical.

> Second, when new work comes in, it is not obvious to folks that they 
> are interested in it.  Thus, they are less likely to make time to 
> attend virtual interims (or, even worse, actual interims)

On the other hand, it's possible we're excluding a large number of 
potential contributors by insisting on doing so much of our work, and 
all of the BoFs, at in-person meetings.

So I suspect the trick is to improve "interim" (i.e. entirely online) 
meetings, and our advertising of them, so that they /attract/ a larger 
number of potential contributors (and also a more diverse group of 
contributors) than our face-to-face meetings and BoFs do.

(This is just a hunch of mine.   I'm not certain it's better, but I 
think it's worth exploring.)

>
> Third, due to the nature of time zones, it is VERY hard to actually 
> find a time when all the folks can make it.  Particularly when you do 
> not know who the interested parties are, as they have not yet had a 
> chance to see the work and discover they are (or are not) interested.

This is indeed a problem and a risk.   I'd hate to see the times of 
virtual interim meetings chosen in such a way as to deliberately or 
effectively favor some participants over others. Then again, I still 
think it's probably easier for folks to be up late at night for a 
virtual meeting, then to travel halfway across the world from wherever 
they are and be up late at night (relative to their home timezone) for a 
physical meeting.   (Though there's something useful about getting away 
from one's normal job, for those who can.   It's just so expensive and 
time-consuming that there are many who cannot do that.)

>
> Yes, this means that sometimes we sometimes use WG face-to-face time 
> to let folsk with new ideas know that their new idea has lots of 
> problems or is not of interest.  That is not, in my book, a waste of 
> time.

Let me take a step back.

In my experience, nearly all face to face meetings that I've experienced 
in my career, were not only a very inefficient use of time, but also a 
huge disruption (not a good one) to creative people who needed focus to 
work.

I've concluded that face-to-face meetings are very useful for some 
things, but the only way to make them an efficient use of time is for 
the meeting to be tightly focused on things that are necessarily, or 
much more efficiently, conducted in face-to-face meetings.

That means, for example:

  * You shouldn't use face-to-face meeting time to explain things to
    people if those things can be communicated over email or a web
    site.   If there are questions about those things (from people who
    have read the email or site) it might be a good use of face-to-face
    meeting time to address those questions - if this can be done
    briefly.  (If people who have read the material have questions, it's
    likely that multiple readers have similar questions, and the answers
    may be illuminating even to those who hadn't thought of the questions.)
  * You shouldn't use face-to-face meeting time to have people report
    their status.   Instead everyone should send a brief status email or
    update a status board N hours prior to the meeting, and everyone who
    attends the meeting should be expected to read those things prior to
    the meeting.   Then the only status discussions can be questions for
    clarification (from people who need to know specifics to do their
    work), and/or negotiations (e.g. "can you finish X so I can finish Y?")
  * You absolutely should not use face-to-face meeting times to present
    documents in detail.   People should read those documents in advance
    of the meeting (or at least summaries of those documents) and come
    prepared with any questions they might have.   (Sometimes you don't
    actually need to read a whole document to understand whether the
    technical choices being made are good ones, but you do need to know
    what those important choices are.)

Potentially good uses of face-to-face IETF WG meetings include:

  * Interactive group discussion of technical issues, taking advantage
    of the high bandwidth and better fidelity of communication (things
    like facial expression, tone of voice, and body language) that
    physical presence permits, which may facilitate a much more rapid
    convergence than would be likely than over email.
  * Flushing out issues that might not have been fully articulated, but
    which may have made several people uncomfortable.  For instance, one
    person can speak up in a meeting and others who share a similar
    concern but might not have expressed it, will feel freer to speak
    up.   (For that matter, if there are significant differences of
    opinion on the topic, those may quickly become apparent, and this is
    also useful to know.)   This can be done on a mailing list also, but
    the potential to get immediate feedback from several participants at
    the same time (and for those participants to get a sense of the room
    that others share their concerns) can be very valuable at bringing
    those issues to the forefront of discussion.
  * Presentations of topics that are not easily communicated effectively
    using text documents and simple drawings, and are of importance to
    the working group.  (these should be rare but do exist)
  * Interaction of almost any kind that serves the WG's purpose, because
    people who have actually talked to one another in person have an
    easier time understanding one another when they communicate over
    email.   (emphasis on Interaction)

I realize that face-to-face meetings are conventional, that there's a 
lot of investment in them, there's a lot of mindshare behind them.   For 
some, they're a good excuse to get out of the office, out of town, 
travel to another country, maybe even experience better weather.   They 
also motivate contributors to get drafts updated.I don't wish to 
dispense with them entirely or even mostly.   But if people are going to 
shell out thousands of dollars to go to a typical IETF meeting, they 
should get a better return for their investment than they're getting 
now.   And if we could make them even slightly cheaper, say by reducing 
the number of days invested by 1 or 2, maybe allowing attendees to take 
advantage of reduced air fares on some days.... well, every little bit 
helps.

Keith

---

From: Warren Kumari <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 May 2019 15:21:14 -0400

On Wed, May 15, 2019 at 5:00 PM Brian E Carpenter
<[email-masked]> wrote:
> ....

indeed a similar issue is when people don't bother capitalizing or
punctuating in their email this shifts the effort from the sender to
the receiver and apart from being rude comes off as extremely arrogant
me and my message are so important that i expect a large number of
readers to have to waste their time figuring out what was meant

w
[I had to write the above "normally" and then go through and strip
punctuation to make the point...]

-- 
I don't think the execution is relevant when it was obviously a bad
idea in the first place.
This is like putting rabid weasels in your pants, and later expressing
regret at having chosen those particular rabid weasels and that pair
of pants.
   ---maf

---

From: Kyle Rose <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 16 May 2019 15:36:14 -0400

> punctuation to make the point...]

Or maybe when threads drift from problems that are IETF-specific to general
"old man yells at cloud/millennials" complaints.

Not that this would happen here.

---

From: "John Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 16 May 2019 16:14:38 -0400

In article <25852.1557871021@localhost> you write:
>traffic about the document. ...

This seems like a reasonable idea.  Perhaps a few WG's could just try
it before Montreal, see if it feels like it makes any difference in
which case we could try a more formal experiment.

My informal metric would be the number of hands to who's read the draft.

---

From: "S. Moonesamy" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 May 2019 16:02:03 -0700

Hello,
>formed. How did that happen? Is it still happening?

The "Global Access to the Internet for All" is an IETF Research Group 
which was formed in 2014.   One of its objectives is "to develop a 
longer term perspective on the impact of GAIA research group findings 
on the standardisation efforts at the IETF".  The Research Group 
published one RFC about three years ago.  It is likely that it does 
not have much impact on standardization efforts given that the only 
output of the Research Group is about taxonomy.

There was a report to the IAB about people coming to the Research 
Group to get more visibility for their own work.  The longer term 
perspective does not look optimistic if the focus is mainly about visibility.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy