Subject: We gotta stop meeting like this

From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2019 18:09:56 -0400

Hi everyone,

From time to time we talk about changing our meeting modalities, and we certainly have done so a bit.  Not so much the plenary, face to face meetings.  For the last 28 years or so, we’ve been meeting three times per year (previously it was four!), and we will continue to do so for a while.  But it’s at least possible that we could meet more effectively and maybe even with fewer plenaries.

Many of us travel great distances just to attend a handful of working groups, especially if we are specialized.  And those working groups meet for an hour or two, and then modulo the hallway conversations, were done.  Being perfectly frank about my own motivations, my daughter wants to know why I generate so much CO2, in what is all too fast becoming her generation’s greatest challenge, and our generation’s greatest shame.

Even so, I am not prepared to propose any particular recommendation, but rather find a way to get to that point through a concerted professional effort that is not performed on the ietf mailing list ;-)

And so draft-lear-we-gotta-stop-meeting-like-this asks the LLC *not* to change our meeting structure, but to bring in the right people to study it in consultation with the IESG, and then to come back with some recommendations for the community’s consideration.  There are no timetables in the draft.  That’s because this might take some time.  And yes there are some financial impacts to be considered, not to mention human impact, not just on standards making, but on the valuable work being done at the Hackathon, and in other activities that colocate with us.

Anyway, have a read.  See what you think.  I’ll be mentioning this at a mic comment in the plenary.

Eliot

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2019 18:15:00 -0400

Who are “the right people?”

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jul 22, 2019, at 6:09 PM, Eliot Lear <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> Hi everyone,
>

---

From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2019 21:18:15 -0500

> Who are “the right people?”

+1

That's just not the process at the IETF, unless by "right people" you
mean "all interested participants", i.e., form a WG.  That would be
fine.

Or if you want to charter a new board of officers like IAB and such just
for this, I guess we could, but that seems like going overboard.

Besides, the proposal seems to bring into conflict an IETF non-goal (CO2
footprint reduction) with an explicit IETF goal (reaching out to a wider
and more diverse community).

Two motivations are given.  One seems aspirational (CO2 footprint
reduction) while the other seems very practical (roughly: "I don't want
to have to spend so many hours flying around for just a few hours of
meeting time") for some participants but not those who have enough
business to want/need to attend for the whole week.  I suspect that the
latter is a stronger motivation than the former for more participants.

Don't we already have an answer for WGs whose participants are generally
very narrowly focused?  Just have more interim meetings, no?

Nico
--

---

From: Rich Kulawiec <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2019 22:41:38 -0400

> and more diverse community).

There is no conflict here.  Meeting travel is expensive, onerous, and
simply not feasible for many people due to a variety of circumstances.
Decreasing the requirement for it will enable participation by a wider
and more diverse community.

---rsk

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2019 22:50:54 -0400

> and more diverse community.

Nominally, we don't require meeting attendance to be an effective
IETF participant, but that's increasingly being met with a wink and a
<nudge>.  I do think that there's an important question in there
about whether or not this is actually what we want.  I think Elliot
went straight to the follow-on question of how to ease that requirement
(if that's, in fact, what we want) and made a few problematic
assumptions about how the process of figuring that out might work, but I
do think that the base question - Do we really want to functionally
require participants to come to meetings? - deserves some attention.

Melinda

---

From: "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 05:00:44 +0000 (UTC)

"Being perfectly frank about my own motivations,
my daughter wants to know why I generate so much CO2,
in what is all too fast becoming her generation’s
greatest challenge, and our generation’s greatest shame."

Just tell her that you're doing it to collect the airmiles.

Lloyd Wood [email-masked] http://about.me/lloydwood

---

From: Dan Harkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 05:03:44 -0700

On 7/22/19 3:09 PM, Eliot Lear wrote:
> Being perfectly frank about my own motivations, my daughter wants to know why I generate so much CO2, in what is all too fast becoming her generation’s greatest challenge, and our generation’s greatest shame.

   Tell your daughter that Malthus is dead, Ehrlich lost his bet, and to 
relax.

   Dan.

---

From: Giovane Moura <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 13:29:50 +0000

> Tell your daughter that Malthus is dead, Ehrlich lost his bet, and
> to relax.

Actually a Montreal native Harvard professor wrote a great book that
covers these topics, and how climate change is  challenging, but it is
also  solvable engineering problem[0].
Similar to the clean up done in cities and rivers recently (compared to
industrial revolution times), but on a bigger scale.

(the effect of this book on me and that made me more optimistic about
the future)

/giovane

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightenment_Now

---

From: Richard Barnes <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 10:12:07 -0400

Let's please not debate climate change on the IETF list.
--RLB

---

From: Jared Mauch <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 10:21:56 -0400

> On Jul 22, 2019, at 10:50 PM, Melinda Shore <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 

I think the issue is the usual stuff we all know:

- People don’t post things on lists that they are willing to say in person
- Sometimes e-mail isn’t the best way to have a discussion
- in-person builds a relationship and trust in ways that other technologies
  just can’t
- I have had things make it to RFC without a need to attend a meeting and
  the conversations happened on-list or off-list
- Not all WGs are equal, some do this better than others, it’s not the chairs
  but often the participants that matter the most in this success IMO

I agree there’s a bit of a wink, but it’s also about the support people receive
from their employer.  It varies by person and group even and can make quite
a difference.

- Jared

---

From: Eric Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 14:48:12 +0000

Agree with Melinda.

I would also point out that zero (or near zero) cost participation should not be a goal.

-----Original Message-----
From: ietf <[email-masked]> On Behalf Of Melinda Shore
Sent: Monday, July 22, 2019 10:51 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: We gotta stop meeting like this

> and more diverse community.

Nominally, we don't require meeting attendance to be an effective IETF participant, but that's increasingly being met with a wink and a <nudge>.  I do think that there's an important question in there about whether or not this is actually what we want.  I think Elliot went straight to the follow-on question of how to ease that requirement (if that's, in fact, what we want) and made a few problematic assumptions about how the process of figuring that out might work, but I do think that the base question - Do we really want to functionally require participants to come to meetings? - deserves some attention.

Melinda

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 11:11:07 -0400

>    but often the participants that matter the most in this success IMO

But there's also another set of issues, e.g.:

- Many of us have had the experience of traveling halfway across the 
world in order to attend WG meetings which were (for various reasons, 
some predictable) mostly a waste (not only of CO2 but also money, time, 
energy, etc.)

- Even though meeting in person can often be more effective than email 
or remote conferencing, we don't structure our in-person meetings to 
make the best use of the opportunities afforded by the investment of 
those precious quantities.

Keith

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 11:11:54 -0400

> I would also point out that zero (or near zero) cost participation should not be a goal.

I disagree.   But perhaps you would care to explain why you believe this?

---

From: Kathleen Moriarty <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 11:15:14 -0400

> I disagree.   But perhaps you would care to explain why you believe this?

Perhaps this depends on where the costs rest.  Is it with participants,
sponsors, or both?  I'm not stating an opinion, but acknowledging that
there will be costs and the funding comes from somewhere even if it is
donated resources from sponsors.

-- 

Best regards,
Kathleen

---

From: Eric Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 15:18:55 +0000

Look at the impact of near-zero cost mailing (in the form of E-Mail) on the tremendous volume of trash we all receive, even after filtering, and extend that to zero cost participation in the IETF.

There is value in having to pass some form of "is it worth it" test - no matter who will be actually paying for it.

---

From: "Damm, Benjamin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 15:21:18 +0000

If the cost went to zero, then would the WGs start to resemble YouTube comment streams? Would we lose an important filtering function? How would we build personal trust?

________________________________
From: ietf <[email-masked]> on behalf of Kathleen Moriarty <[email-masked]>
Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2019 11:15 AM
To: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Cc: IETF <[email-masked]>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: We gotta stop meeting like this

On Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 11:12 AM Keith Moore <[email-masked]<mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:

Perhaps this depends on where the costs rest.  Is it with participants, sponsors, or both?  I'm not stating an opinion, but acknowledging that there will be costs and the funding comes from somewhere even if it is donated resources from sponsors.

--

Best regards,
Kathleen

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 11:22:28 -0400

> There is value in having to pass some form of "is it worth it" test - no matter who will be actually paying for it.

ok, thanks for explaining.   I'm not sure that access to money is a good 
filter, but I get your point.

(I was wondering about maybe requiring participants to answer questions 
about IP networks.   e.g. "How many bits are in an IP address?"  correct 
answer: 128 :)

Keith

---

From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 12:04:56 -0400

> On 23 Jul 2019, at 11:21, Damm, Benjamin <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 

That’s an important question.  And if I were to project what the LLC might find, it would be precisely that we need the human interaction; and so eliminating in-person meetings is not very likely to happen.  But do we need 3x per year as a plenary to achieve that or should we do 2x + something more focused?  Or  should we extend meeting lengths?  And what data do we need to even address these questions and come up with alternatives?

Eliot

> 
> 
> From: ietf <[email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]>> on behalf of Kathleen Moriarty <[email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]>>
> To: Keith Moore <[email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]>>
> Cc: IETF <[email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]>>
> On Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 11:12 AM Keith Moore <[email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:

---

From: Alejandro Acosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 12:13:05 -0400

Hi Eliot,

  I think I agree with you.
  I also will take advantage of your message and say (for the 2nd or 3rd
time) that IETF should consider the environment/ecosystem/climate when
developing new protocols. In the same way required sections such as:
"IANA Considerations Section" and/or "Security Considerations Section"
exists, one more section called something like: "Environment impact"
should exists. I know this is difficult to measure, however I do have
faith that it will make the authors thinks twice when designing
protocols (battery friendly/consumption)

  My two cents.

Alejandro,

---

From: "Maisonneuve, Julien (Nokia - FR/Paris-Saclay)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 18:17:59 +0000

> There is value in having to pass some form of "is it worth it" test - no matter who will be actually paying for it.

Doesn't remote meeting participation show some sort of counter-argument ? Cost is zero, and I haven't noted much disruption in current meetings (though that would be possible).

Julien.

---

From: Fernando Gont <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 19:10:45 +0100

> There is value in having to pass some form of "is it worth it" test - no matter who will be actually paying for it.

That may as well keep valuable people out, and making meetings be the
turf of big companies that can afford it.

-- 
Fernando Gont
SI6 Networks
e-mail: [email-masked]
PGP Fingerprint: 6666 31C6 D484 63B2 8FB1 E3C4 AE25 0D55 1D4E 7492

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 14:44:20 -0400

> turf of big companies that can afford it.

even worse than it already is.   (yes, I agree)

---

From: Eric Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 19:11:00 +0000

I have been attending Singapore IETF meetings remotely.  I also remotely attended one IETF meeting in Berlin, as a result of a passport issue that came up immediately before the meeting.

There is a cost, since in any Time Zone, that can mean attending meetings at ridiculous o'Clock.  With Singapore, for example, the offset is such that I would be attending meetings between the hours of 9 PM and 7 AM.  That cost can be quite high, since you are effectively available all day for your paying gig - leading to very long days.

There is also a cost in the sense that remote attendees are at a distinct disadvantage at IETF meetings, largely because they are mostly outnumbered by the folks who are not attending remotely.  Discussions take place and sometimes decisions are made that do not typically involve remote attendees.  Also, however hard people might try not to, it is often easy to ignore remote attendees at least to some extent.

There is at least one additional cost - to the industry and to the effectiveness of the IETF (or any other SDO) in developing useful and timely standards - associated with the loss of the distinct advantages in cooperation, conflict resolution and consensus building that most people recognize as being primarily achievable via face-to-face discussion.

Also the current no-fee remote attendance is explicitly a temporary policy.

A major shift in the balance toward remote attendance would reduce the advantages of physical attendance, reducing the disadvantages of remote attendance (quite possibly significantly), but would most likely result in a need to impose an attendance fee for remote attendance to defray IETF operating costs.  Unless we were trying to reduce the costs to nearer to zero (by - perhaps - targeting an increase in attendance by two or more orders of magnitude), the cost per attendee would be within an order of magnitude of the same as it is now.

Strangely, using the current remote attendance as a "proof of concept" that very low cost IETF participation is usefully achievable in anything like near term reminds me a great deal of similar claims made about other ideas where some might try to extrapolate the results of significant deployment from a relatively small experimental basis.

-----Original Message-----
From: Maisonneuve, Julien (Nokia - FR/Paris-Saclay) <[email-masked]> 
Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2019 2:18 PM
To: Eric Gray <[email-masked]>; Keith Moore <[email-masked]>; [email-masked]
Subject: RE: We gotta stop meeting like this
Importance: High

Julien.

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 15:16:49 -0400

> Also the current no-fee remote attendance is explicitly a temporary policy.

I'm using Meetecho this week (fortunately from the same time zone) and 
am delighted with it.  It's clear that there are real and significant 
costs associated with providing that service, that will someday have to 
be recovered if the service is to continue and use of it scales up.   I 
don't have a problem with that.   I agree that trying to force remote 
participation to be "free" when there are real and significant costs to 
be recovered, is probably misdirected.

Recovering costs is one thing.   However I do take issue with the notion 
that IETF participants should have to pay for the privilege of 
participating.

Keith

---

From: Eric Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 19:17:06 +0000

I also tend to agree, sadly.  But with a qualification: valuable people are not typically locked in to working for employers that cannot afford to pay them to do this sort of work, if they want to do it and have value to add.

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 15:20:49 -0400

On 7/23/19 3:17 PM, Eric Gray wrote:

> valuable people are not typically locked in to working for employers that cannot afford to pay them to do this sort of work, if they want to do it and have value to add.

well-paying ethical work can be (surprisingly, to some) difficult to 
find.   "ethical" = creates actual value (as opposed to, say, robbing 
one person to benefit another, or taking advantage of people's 
misfortunes to make their lives even worse) and not having the purpose 
or side effect of doing significant harm to or threatening people or 
their welfare.

Keith

---

From: Mary B <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 15:32:34 -0400

On Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 3:19 PM Eric Gray <[email-masked]> wrote:

> I also tend to agree, sadly.  But with a qualification: valuable people
> are not typically locked in to working for employers that cannot afford to
> pay them to do this sort of work, if they want to do it and have value to
> add.
>

[MB]  As an independent consultant, I paid my own way to IETF for several
years.  The work I did in IETF was relevant to the work I was doing
elsewhere for my customers, but startups often don't have the money to pay
all these travel expenses nor do governments.  My time was covered when I
was spending time directly in WGs, on drafts, etc, that were related,  but
I got no travel reimbursement.    For those that have gotten a full ride
from an employer while participating in IETF,  I don't think you're in a
position to make judgements as to the value or qualifications of those that
pay their own way.   Indeed, you should be thanking us for effectively
working for free for "the good of the Internet."    [/MB]

> >> Look at the impact of near-zero cost mailing (in the form of E-Mail) on
> the tremendous volume of trash we all receive, even after filtering, and
> extend that to zero cost participation in the IETF.
> >>
> >> There is value in having to pass some form of "is it worth it" test -
> no matter who will be actually paying for it.

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 16:31:15 -0400

On 7/23/19 3:32 PM, Mary B wrote:
> For those that have
> gotten a full ride from an employer while participating in IETF,  I
> don't think you're in a position to make judgements as to the value or
> qualifications of those that pay their own way.   Indeed, you should be
> thanking us for effectively working for free for "the good of the
> Internet."    

Hear, hear!  Plus, this is going to vary by country, etc.  It's
also the case that there are people who have much to contribute
who make decisions about employment based on criteria other than
whether or not there's the willingness/availability of employers
to foot the bill for IETF participation.

Melinda

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 13:55:00 -0700

On 7/23/2019 12:32 PM, Mary B wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 3:19 PM Eric Gray <[email-masked] 
> <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
> 
>     I also tend to agree, sadly.  But with a qualification: valuable
>     people are not typically locked in to working for employers that
>     cannot afford to pay them to do this sort of work, if they want to
>     do it and have value to add.

offlist.

Eric,

Mary's public response was considerably more polite and restrained that 
your note warranted.

Your note was a rather classic bit of ignorant arrogance, both 
deprecating a legitimate -- and arguably essential -- class of 
participant and lacking analytic foundation.

d/
-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net

---

From: "Stan Kalisch" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 17:45:15 -0400

> I also tend to agree, sadly. But with a qualification: valuable people are not typically locked in to working for employers that cannot afford to pay them to do this sort of work, if they want to d…

Do you have data to support this assertion?

Stan

---

From: Dan Harkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 14:55:02 -0700

No one is debating climate change. It was expressing optimism for the
future in the face of climate change.

   Dan.

On 7/23/19 7:12 AM, Richard Barnes wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 9:30 AM Giovane Moura 
> <giovane.moura=[email-masked] 
> <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
>
>

---

From: Richard Barnes <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 18:02:24 -0400

In any case, not a topic for the IETF list.

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 18:06:54 -0400

So we should just keep our heads in the sand and keep wasting 
everybody's time, money, energy, and CO2?

On 7/23/19 6:02 PM, Richard Barnes wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 5:56 PM Dan Harkins <[email-masked] 
> <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
>
>

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 10:09:56 +1200

> I also tend to agree, sadly.  But with a qualification: valuable people are not typically locked in to working for employers that cannot afford to pay them to do this sort of work, if they want to…

That might be true in countries with low barriers to changing jobs or career paths. But for countries or career paths where long tenure is the norm, this argument usually doesn't apply.

    Brian

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 10:11:47 +1200

How would that^^ do as a valid IETF topic?

Regards
   Brian Carpenter

On 24-Jul-19 10:06, Keith Moore wrote:
> So we should just keep our heads in the sand and keep wasting everybody's time, money, energy, and CO2?
> 
>> On Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 5:56 PM Dan Harkins <[email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
>>
>>

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 19:27:45 -0400

> Doesn't remote meeting participation show some sort of counter-argument
    > ? Cost is zero, and I haven't noted much disruption in current meetings
    > (though that would be possible).

Remote participation has a non-incremental cost to the person.

The return on investment can be negative if the person who is remote has not
made human contacts with others that seems to be necessary to establish
enough trust to get work adopted and progressed.  While exceptional people
can do this by email, and this was easier before the continuous September,
it is, I think exceptional.

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

---

From: Dan Harkins <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2019 21:25:02 -0700

Well yes sir, officer Barnes, SIR!

---

From: Nick Hilliard <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 09:38:58 +0100

> How would that^^ do as a valid IETF topic?

I really like this, as an explicit goal.

Nick

---

From: "Bjoern A. Zeeb" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 11:31:06 +0000

> How would that^^ do as a valid IETF topic?

http://turnofftheinternet.com

/bz

---

From: "Andrew G. Malis" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 08:17:09 -0400

The Broadband Forum has been including energy efficiency in their
specifications as an explicit goal. See, for example,
https://www.broadband-forum.org/technical/download/TR-293.pdf .

Cheers,
Andy

---

From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 08:21:54 -0400

Obviously, much of the IoT-related work is about enabling processing and networking with little energy use.  Whether that actually saves energy (or is used to proliferate frugal, but still somewhat energy-using IoT devices to new orders of magnitude) is hard to predict.  But we are doing our share.

Grüße, Carsten

---

From: Alexandre Petrescu <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 14:22:48 +0200

> http://turnofftheinternet.com

It displays a red button.  It can be pressed.  When pressed it says "you 
have now safely shutdown the Internet".  It does not work, in the sense 
that Internet still works afterwards.  I take it as more of a suggestion 
to wonder about what would happen if.

Alex

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 13:05:20 +0000 (UTC)

encryption is a large waste of energy,as are proof of work functions for blockchains.
we need to get rid of hashes and hard maths.To save energy. And the Earth.

Lloyd [email-masked]
but not checksums! we need checksums!

On Wednesday, July 24, 2019, 6:38 pm, Nick Hilliard <[email-masked]> wrote:

Nick

---

From: Eric Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 13:13:43 +0000

Might be okay.  We have energy saving as a goal in other networking standards groups...

-----Original Message-----
From: ietf <[email-masked]> On Behalf Of Brian E Carpenter
Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2019 6:12 PM
To: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>; [email-masked]
Subject: Energy saving as an IETF goal

Regards
   Brian Carpenter

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 09:32:58 -0400

> it is, I think exceptional.

The correct term is: 
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Eternal September or the September that never ended[1] is Usenet slang for a
period beginning in September 1993,[2][3] the month that Internet service
provider America Online (AOL) began offering Usenet access to its many users,
overwhelming the existing culture for online forums. 

Before then, Usenet was largely restricted to colleges, universities, and
other research institutions. Every September, a large number of incoming
freshmen would acquire access to Usenet for the first time, taking time to
become accustomed to Usenet's standards of conduct and "netiquette". After a
month or so, these new users would either learn to comply with the networks'
social norms or tire of using the service. 

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

---

From: Eric Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 14:15:09 +0000

Ah.  There’s a conversation stopper…

From: ietf <[email-masked]> On Behalf Of Keith Moore
Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2019 6:07 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: We gotta stop meeting like this

On Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 5:56 PM Dan Harkins <[email-masked]<mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 10:25:19 -0400

> Ah.  There’s a conversation stopper…
As far as I can tell, the conversation has continued in useful ways 
(though with a changed subject, which is often appropriate).

I think we should continue looking at whether the way we meet is a wise 
and optimal use of resources.  But surely the energy and CO2 consumption 
by the Internet itself is much larger than that required to travel to 
meetings, and IETF may be able to make significant contributions there 
by considering energy as a criterion in protocol design choices.

Keith

---

From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 10:34:53 -0400

On Jul 24, 2019, at 9:05 AM, lloyd.wood=[email-masked] wrote:
> encryption is a large waste of energy,
> as are proof of work functions for blockchains.

It would be useful to collect some data on this.   It is not my impression that blockchain proof-of-work is many orders of magnitude more wasteful of energy than plain-old encryption.   Lumping them both into the same bucket is quite misleading.   But perhaps you have better data on this than I do, and can make this more clear?

---

From: Christer Holmberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 14:36:58 +0000

I read somewhere that every email sent adds 0.14 ounces of CO2 to the atmosphere…

Regards,

Christer

From: ietf <[email-masked]> on behalf of Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wednesday, 24 July 2019 at 17.27
To: IETF Discussion <[email-masked]>
Subject: Re: We gotta stop meeting like this

As far as I can tell, the conversation has continued in useful ways (though with a changed subject, which is often appropriate).

I think we should continue looking at whether the way we meet is a wise and optimal use of resources.  But surely the energy and CO2 consumption by the Internet itself is much larger than that required to travel to meetings, and IETF may be able to make significant contributions there by considering energy as a criterion in protocol design choices.

Keith

---

From: "Stan Kalisch" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 11:29:35 -0400

> Ah. There’s a conversation stopper…

It's the issue on which the conversation was predicated in the first place.

Stan

> *From:* ietf <[email-masked]> *On Behalf Of *Keith Moore
> *Sent:* Tuesday, July 23, 2019 6:07 PM
> *To:* [email-masked]
> *Subject:* Re: We gotta stop meeting like this

---

From: Joel Jaeggli <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 10:10:10 -0700

> I really like this, as an explicit goal.

The pursuit of efficiency as a integral component pays profound
dividends. imho it has been an explicit goal of a number of IETF activities.

---

From: George Michaelson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 13:36:58 -0400

As an example, Lorenzo has commented in the past that unfortunate
aspects of early IPv6 implementations having huge effect on battery.
There is a linkage between protocol behaviour across L2, and power
cost.

Doing work to save battery life on a handheld, is not a huge distance
from doing work on a protocol to save DC power budget. Or, AirCon.

-G

---

From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 14:54:27 -0400

I think it is an interesting topic and very much on topic for us to think about. And a topic where potential savings could be significant. IT is a huge energy consumer (as well as a producer of short-lived gadgets). IT also has the potential to help optimise many non-IT processes, and therefore directly reduce energy consumption and waste.

But of course this is also complex topic and not one where only IETF or only standards help. And a topic where continuous improvements in compute and comms are often offset by more high res videos and ever growing software packages (as well as auto-play and zillions of adverts, placed on my screen after way too much ML analysis).

I’d be eager to work on this, assuming we can come up with proposals that can have an impact.

Jari

---

From: Alejandro Acosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 23:48:27 -0400

+1

and I'm very happy to see a long thread about this topic (most with
positive comments)

---

From: Fernando Gont <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2019 13:28:37 +0100

On 23/7/19 20:17, Eric Gray wrote:
> cannot afford to pay them to do this sort of work, if they want to do
> it and have value to add.

I have no idea what's the rationale for this statement.

I can tell you that it is extremely difficult (if at all possible) to
have your employer support your IETF work in regions such as Latin
America and the Caribbean.

Even for other regions, it would seem
(http://www.arkko.com/tools/recrfcstats/companydistr.html) the vast
majority of recent RFCs have been authored by folks from a dozen
different companies or so. Not a lot of diversity in terms of
affiliations/employers. When looking at countries, it is even more so:
http://www.arkko.com/tools/recrfcstats/d-countrydistr.html

Thanks,

---

From: Bob Hinden <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 07:26:21 -0400

Elliot,

To respond to your first post on this topic, I think meeting three times a year in the current manner is fine.   There is a lot of value in face to face meetings and I think they should continue.

Bob

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 23:47:30 +1200

Hi Fernando,

> http://www.arkko.com/tools/recrfcstats/d-countrydistr.html

To be honest, I am not so concerned about diversity among the named
authors. IMHO, we need to produce RFCs that are useful to the whole
community, not just to the employers of their authors. Therefore,
what really matters is diversity among the people who review and
comment on drafts, and among those who produce early implementations
and operational feedback. 

That is probably much harder to measure than diversity among the authors.

That said, I agree that convincing employers in some regions is much
harder than others. You only have to look at the pie chart of attendees
per country to see that.

Incidentally, I wonder whether diversity among Hackathon participants
is different.

    Brian

---

From: Rich Kulawiec <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 08:16:38 -0400

On Wed, Jul 24, 2019 at 02:54:27PM -0400, Jari Arkko wrote:
> I think it is an interesting topic and very much on topic for us to
> think about. And a topic where potential savings could be significant. IT
> is a huge energy consumer (as well as a producer of short-lived
> gadgets). IT also has the potential to help optimise many non-IT
> processes, and therefore directly reduce energy consumption and waste.

I'm completely in favor of both of these, but suggest that it may
be more appropriate for the IETF to focus on the former than the latter.
I think it might be the place where the most aggregate (IETF) expertise
can be brought to bear.

With that in mind, I think a good starting point would be a discussion
of metrics: how do we measure -- for example -- the energy cost of a
file transfer over HTTP vs FTP?  How do we measure the difference between
a DNS SOA query over IPv4 vs. IPv6?  And so on.  I suspect that rather
a lot of work needs to be done on measurement before we can begin
thinking about what could be improved/changed to cut energy costs.

(If there is published work in this space and I'm unaware of it,
please feel free to hit me with the cluestick and I'll go read it.)

---rsk

---

From: Loa Andersson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 09:12:22 -0400

+1

/Loa

-- 

Loa Andersson                        email: [email-masked]
Senior MPLS Expert
Bronze Dragon Consulting             phone: +46 739 81 21 64

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 09:27:21 -0400

> and operational feedback.

I am extremely concerned about a lack of employer diversity among 
authors/editors.   Anyone who has authored or edited an RFC knows that 
that role carries with it tremendous power to influence the output, to 
word things in such a way that you like the result. (Yes, the author has 
to earn rough consensus, but the author still gets to choose the words.)

In a sense, this is the very job of an author or editor.   But when the 
authors or editors of RFCs are mostly from a small number of large 
companies, those RFCs are likely to represent the interests of those 
companies much more than the interests of the wider IETF community or 
the Internet as a whole.

Keith

---

From: George Michaelson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 10:01:12 -0400

Meeting 3x a year implies a belief there is a 3x a year duty cycle f2f
progressing work. But, there are questions inside this. What if we
met, but not all WG met 3x a year? What if we accepted a loss of focus
is killing the joy, and we divided to conquor?

What if we met 3x a year, but we locked in Prague, Vancouver and
Singapore (for instance. please don't critique the specifics, the idea
is that we fix site and date) for instance? the mechanics of managing
the Internet tourism would disappear, we'd shed cost for longterm
relationship and a huge amount of excess heat goes out of a process
conversation few enjoy.

I'm not sold on either story, but I like the questions. It amuses me
somebody (like me but not these groups) can be in SNMP *and* in MAPRG
*and* in IRTF (for instance) because the linear programming of "avoid
collisions" is next to impossible now.

-G

---

From: Rich Kulawiec <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 10:05:22 -0400

> I also tend to agree, sadly.  But with a qualification: valuable people are not typically locked in to working for employers that cannot afford to pay them to do this sort of work, if they want to…

Many of the most valuable bits of work contributed to the Internet --
whether in the context of the IETF or not -- have come from people
who don't enjoy the wealth and privilege that would allow them to
travel to meetings.  Excluding those people, whether deliberately
or accidentally, from participation means selectively including those
people who *do* have wealth and privilege.  This risks creating
a bias -- in content, in processes, in everything -- that favors
the haves over the have-nots and thus works to perpetuate the cycle.

I'm not suggesting that this is deliberate: in fact, I'm suggesting
that it's not.  But it exists, it shows up in many places, and that
is worrisome.

---rsk

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2019 02:09:18 +1200

Keith,

> companies much more than the interests of the wider IETF community or 

That's all true, of course, but it's a fact of life that larger companies
can afford to pay some employees to do substantial amounts of IETF work,
and smaller companies can't. My comment was based on the assumption that
there's no point in being concerned about something that can't be changed.

   Brian

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 10:37:36 -0400

> there's no point in being concerned about something that can't be changed.

I guess I think there is some potential for positive change there if, 
for example, we can reduce the cost of effective participation.

Keith

---

From: Donald Eastlake <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 10:46:48 -0400

I am also in favor of keeping three meetings a year.

On Thu, Jul 25, 2019 at 10:01 AM George Michaelson <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
> ... But, there are questions inside this. What if we
> met, but not all WG met 3x a year? ...

It is never the case that all WGs meet at an IETF meeting. An IETF WG
is not required to have any physical meetings at all. There have been
WGs that never met but did all their work on their mailing list.

Thanks,
Donald
===============================
 Donald E. Eastlake 3rd   +1-508-333-2270 (cell)
 1424 Pro Shop Court, Davenport, FL 33896 USA
 [email-masked]

> ...

---

From: Joel Jaeggli <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 07:59:07 -0700

> for example, we can reduce the cost of effective participation.
One probable way to at least hold down the cost of onsite participation
and of providing remote participation during meetings is to adjust our
expectations about the services delivered during meetings, which range
from the network, to cookies, to the location of the venue. venue
selection and requirements has quite a bit of work going into it already.

One area that particularly needs feedback at this time is the meeting
network requirements which held a bof this time.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/105/materials/agenda-105-netrqmts-00

video will appear here

http://ietf105.conf.meetecho.com/index.php/Recordings#NETRQMTS

there is a mailing list here

https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/netrqmts

There is intent to have a survey as an outcome of the BOF to further
explore the priorities and needs of the community both present and
remote during meetings.

joel

---

From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 17:10:59 +0200

> WGs that never met but did all their work on their mailing list.

Not meeting at every IETF sounds plausible, until you get to the point
about which meeting to leave out. Of course one could decide not to meet
when there's really nothing to discuss F2F, but for a long-going active
WG, how likely is that?

I think we really should consider reducing the number of meetings to 2
per year (at most), and then think hard how to compensate for that:

- more *virtual* interim WG meetings
- improvements to cross-area review: move last calls to a mailing list
other than ietf-discuss (good suggestion, Mark!), and also see how we
can get more review from outside of the WG *before* IETF LC

Best regards, Julian

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2019 03:22:12 +1200

On 26-Jul-19 02:37, Keith Moore wrote:
> I guess I think there is some potential for positive change there if, for example, we can reduce the cost of effective participation.

I'm all for that, but of course we cannot reduce the cost of hours of work
done between meetings, which can be a very significant burden for small
companies or individual contributors, but lost in the noise for large
companies. So I think it's realistic to solicit more comments and reviews
from such participants, but somewhat unrealistic to expect more drafting
work from them. In other words, don't expect that making meetings more
accessible will substantially change the bias towards large-company
authorship.

    Brian

---

From: Dave Cridland <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 16:23:41 +0100

> can get more review from outside of the WG *before* IETF LC
Well.

I would love to see more (virtual) interim meetings for WG introspection,
and then use the IETF week for more outward presentation.

That is, use WG sessions in the IETF weeks for WGs to show ongoing work and
seek feedback from across the area, and IETF as a whole. I think this
happens, to some degree, anyway - but it'd be nice to see this as a focus.

If lots of people travel halfway across the world just to hide away in
little groups for a few meetings, then this just doesn't seem to add any
real value to me. It's more cost-effective if they hit a virtual call more
often to handle the high-bandwidth, F2F needs. (Or just used XMPP, but
there's my bias). But since Interims and IETF meetings are considered the
same thing for the same reason, WGs can't hold an Interim easily (unless
that's changed recently?).

Dave.

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 11:34:08 -0400

> I am also in favor of keeping three meetings a year.

I am not.
..because three is not enough :-)

The number of conflicts that occur is not going away, and won't on away
unless we kill the right ~25% of the WGs, and anyway, while that might
eliminate many conflicts, it will mean the remaining groups will be much
bigger.
Or we go to two-week meetings with fewer tracks, and more "time off".
Two week meetings provides a better ratio of meeting time/CO2, but is
probably not supportable.
 
I want to move towards having much more frequent, regular and longer virtual
meetings online.  We do this with varying degrees of success with virtual
interim meetings.

The meetecho system is actually far better than many of the available
solutions that we attempt to use, but the meetecho system requires a physical
place as an anchor.

So I like what we concluded at the IETF104 dogfood (manycouches) side
meeting: we need to add a fourth virtual (non-interim) meeting, maybe even a
firth one, before we can remove or change any one of the three physical
meetings.

---

From: "S. Moonesamy" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 08:41:24 -0700

Dear Fernando,
>America and the Caribbean.

One of the questions which I have received from a few 
participants/potential participants  residing in a few countries in 
Africa was about how to get employer support for IETF activities.  In 
my opinion, those persons may have encountered situations similar to 
the one mentioned above.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy

---

From: Kent Watsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 15:52:10 +0000

Along these lines, roughly a decade ago I filed a patent for selective routing to data centers for purposes of power control and environmental impact [1].  While I've left Juniper since, if there were interest, they may be willing to assign the IPR to IETF if asked nicely.

That said, this patent somewhat missed the claim.  What's really needed is power-based routing in general (not just to data centers), whereby how green the power is matters.  Of course, getting routers to accurately testify the greeness of their power source could be difficult...

[1] http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=2&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=8,798,071&OS=8,798,071&RS=8,798,071

Kent

> On Jul 24, 2019, at 2:54 PM, Jari Arkko <[email-masked]> wrote:
>

---

From: George Michaelson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 12:05:42 -0400

There was some work in Melbourne Uni (or monash) on the energy
implications of on-card and off-card routing. If its on-card, it
passes through an FPGA path which may be both faster and cheaper
energy than the core CPU. if the core cpu wakes up on complex DPI or
routing logic it invokes L2 and working-set and so goes into core
power and memory bus cost.

So, switching-vs-routing and on-card and off-card and in-card fastpath
absolutely affect power cost in the device.

Is this all L0 or L-1? No. the upper layer routing architecture and
use of out of order or un-ordered IPv6 headers affects on-card and
in-core routing outcomes. EH means you cost more work to route.

-G

---

From: Alvaro Retana <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 14:01:55 -0400

I also think this could be an interesting topic for the IETF.

A few years ago we wrote a "Framework and Requirements for Energy Aware
Control Planes” [1].  There wasn’t a lot of interest at the time and we
intended to publish it somehow, but got busy on other things…

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-retana-rtgwg-eacp

Alvaro.

On July 25, 2019 at 11:52:35 AM, Kent Watsen ([email-masked]) wrote:

Along these lines, roughly a decade ago I filed a patent for selective
routing to data centers for purposes of power control and environmental
impact [1].  While I've left Juniper since, if there were interest, they
may be willing to assign the IPR to IETF if asked nicely.

That said, this patent somewhat missed the claim.  What's really needed is
power-based routing in general (not just to data centers), whereby how
green the power is matters.  Of course, getting routers to accurately
testify the greeness of their power source could be difficult...

[1]
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=2&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=8,798,071&OS=8,798,071&RS=8,798,071

Kent

I think it is an interesting topic and very much on topic for us to think
about. And a topic where potential savings could be significant. IT is a
huge energy consumer (as well as a producer of short-lived gadgets). IT
also has the potential to help optimise many non-IT processes, and
therefore directly reduce energy consumption and waste.

But of course this is also complex topic and not one where only IETF or
only standards help. And a topic where continuous improvements in compute
and comms are often offset by more high res videos and ever growing
software packages (as well as auto-play and zillions of adverts, placed on
my screen after way too much ML analysis).

I’d be eager to work on this, assuming we can come up with proposals that
can have an impact.

Jari

---

From: Lars Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 14:13:40 -0400

Hi,

quick reminder that over in the IRTF space, a proposed research group on energy-efficient networking tried was discussed around 2012. The proposed EERG never officially formed, but its mailing list archive (https://listserv.neclab.eu//pipermail/eerg/2012-August/date.html#start) is still around, and if you Google for something like "IRTF EERG energy" you might find some presentations from back then.

Lars

---

From: Jacob Hoffman-Andrews <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 13:12:25 -0700

Thanks for writing this up, Eliot! I strongly agree that we need to cut 
down on the travel-intensity of IETF participation. One of the great 
promises of the Internet is the ability to collaborate at a distance. As 
the IETF, it is literally our job to make this work well.

We're already doing fairly well. All WGs are teleconferenced, 
connectivity at the venue is solid, AV is extremely well managed, and 
the meeting leaders do an excellent job of calling on people in the 
teleconference queue. Meetecho is good software.

But there are still problem areas. For instance, it seems like there's 
not an easy way to teleconference side meetings. And we need to plan for 
a change in funding model as participation moves away from in-person.

There's another way we can improve things without waiting for research 
or a new WG: Just don't go. I blogged about this last week: 
https://jacob.hoffman-andrews.com/README/2019/07/19/i-will-not-attend.html. 
I'm pledging not to fly to conferences, including IETF. I ask you all to 
do the same. Along the way we'll figure out what needs to be fixed, and 
we'll fix it.

---

From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2019 18:04:25 -0500

On Thu, Jul 25, 2019 at 10:01:12AM -0400, George Michaelson wrote:
>            [...]. But, there are questions inside this. What if we
> met, but not all WG met 3x a year? [...]

That's already the case.

---

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2019 06:10:38 +0200

This threads mails on CO2 and climate change are somewhat pythonesque to me...

The IETF trying to shame itself about 3 meetings of 1000 people a year
while its product, the Internet has been the biggest reducer of energy
that i could think of in comparison of equivalent alternatives.
For the whole planet for the last few decades.

Email/online-group-communications vs. transporting physical equivalents,
video conferencing, Home office, Telecommuning vs. train, plane automobiles
and ships ?  Telemedicine, digitalization as opposed to all the paper economy
overhead, remote telemetry, industrial operations instead of shipping people, ... ???

Do we like all the excesses (IP) networks are used for ? Of couse not.
Should we continue to improve ? Sure! Should we eat more of our own dog food
(e.g.: virtual meetings) ? absolutely. But should we feel ashamed about the
limited transportation required to create the Internet standardization ?
Try to come up with any metric in which that would make sense.  Show me any
other standards body where an equal or larger part of work gets done with
such a low-power mechanism as ASCII emails.

IETF travel is not part of this problem. Its been a key part of developing and applying
the solution for a long time.

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2019 07:53:36 +0000

Hi Alvaro, all,

Agree.

We used to have a problem statement for what we called at that time PANET (Power-Aware NETworking):
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-zhang-panet-problem-statement-03

The questions raised in Section 4 of that draft are still interesting ones (including the potential implications on network operations).

FWIW, other I-Ds were edited at that time. I can cite for example:

* draft-zhang-panet-use-cases: Use Cases for Power-Aware Networks
* draft-dong-panet-requirement: Requirements for Power Aware Network
* draft-mjsraman-panet-bgp-power-path: Reducing Power Consumption using BGP path selection
* draft-mjsraman-panet-intra-as-psp-te-leak: Building power shortest inter-Area TE LSPs using pre-computed paths

Some of the documents were already presented in rtgwg and eman wgs. The outcome of these discussion at that time is that this is more a research area.

Cheers,
Med

De : ietf [mailto:[email-masked]] De la part de Alvaro Retana
Envoyé : jeudi 25 juillet 2019 20:02
À : Kent Watsen; Jari Arkko
Cc : IETF discussion list
Objet : Re: Energy saving as an IETF goal

A few years ago we wrote a "Framework and Requirements for Energy Aware Control Planes” [1].  There wasn’t a lot of interest at the time and we intended to publish it somehow, but got busy on other things…

Alvaro.

On July 25, 2019 at 11:52:35 AM, Kent Watsen ([email-masked]<mailto:[email-masked]>) wrote:

Kent

On Jul 24, 2019, at 2:54 PM, Jari Arkko <[email-masked]<mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:

Jari

---

From: Alexandre Petrescu <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2019 11:05:42 +0200

Le 26/07/2019 à 09:53, [email-masked] a écrit :
> The questions raised in Section 4 of that draft are still interesting 
> ones (including the potential implications on network operations).
> 
> * draft-mjsraman-panet-intra-as-psp-te-leak: Building power shortest 
> inter-Area TE LSPs using pre-computed paths
> 
> Some of the documents were already presented in rtgwg and eman wgs. The 
> outcome of these discussion at that time is that this is more a research 
> area.

Additionally,

We wrote and implemented an I-D about IPv6 vs IPv4 consumption in 
smartphone:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-petrescu-v6ops-ipv6-power-ipv4-00

We wrote, implemented and protected an I-D about an Energy Metric for 
IPv6 links:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281272590_Energy_Metric_for_IPv6_Links
(this was also an experiment of IPRing an Internet Draft without 
publishing it at IETF)

Alex

> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Med
> 
> *De :*ietf [mailto:[email-masked]] *De la part de* Alvaro Retana
> *Envoyé :* jeudi 25 juillet 2019 20:02
> *À :* Kent Watsen; Jari Arkko
> *Cc :* IETF discussion list
> *Objet :* Re: Energy saving as an IETF goal
> 
>     Along these lines, roughly a decade ago I filed a patent for
>     selective routing to data centers for purposes of power control and
>     environmental impact [1].  While I've left Juniper since, if there
>     were interest, they may be willing to assign the IPR to IETF if
>     asked nicely.
> 
>     That said, this patent somewhat missed the claim.  What's really
>     needed is power-based routing in general (not just to data centers),
>     whereby how green the power is matters.  Of course, getting routers
>     to accurately testify the greeness of their power source could be
>     difficult...
> 
>     [1]
>     think about. And a topic where potential savings could be
>     significant. IT is a huge energy consumer (as well as a producer of
>     short-lived gadgets). IT also has the potential to help optimise
>     many non-IT processes, and therefore directly reduce energy
>     consumption and waste.
> 
>     But of course this is also complex topic and not one where only IETF
>     or only standards help. And a topic where continuous improvements in
>     compute and comms are often offset by more high res videos and ever
>     growing software packages (as well as auto-play and zillions of
>     adverts, placed on my screen after way too much ML analysis).
>

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2019 23:14:00 +1200

Toerless,

This thread is not about meetings. It's about protocol design and operational recommendations. After all, the Internet is directly responsible for several % of world energy consumption. The exact value is still debatable: https://digital-me-up.com/2019/05/17/invisible-pollution-of-internet/

Regards
   Brian

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2019 07:17:47 -0400

> For the whole planet for the last few decades.

Maybe.   The Internet also consumes a lot of power, both directly 
(routers, servers, etc.) and via things enabled by the Internet (e.g. 
bitcoin; and people keep PCs on now that we have constant connectivity, 
whereas they used to turn them off).  Without a detailed analysis, I see 
no reason to be confident that there's an overall savings in carbon.

(Whether there's an overall benefit to the public, given all of the 
issues surrounding privacy and political manipulation, might also be up 
for question.   I like having easy access to information and goods and 
services, don't like that nearly everyone's phone and computer is now an 
eavesdropping device.)

However, I don't think "shaming" helps, for much of anything. I think 
"shaming" can result in a decrease of awareness.   It promotes denial 
and distraction away from other issues that might be worse or more 
deserving of attention.

It's easy to look at the carbon cost of a single transcontinental 
airplane flight (or of a few flights for IETF) and think "that's too 
much".   But the best way to reduce one's total carbon generation might 
be, for example, to reduce the number of less distant flights one takes 
in a year.   For instance,  travel by train, when that option is 
available.   Save the carbon-generation for the trips that really matter.

But focusing entirely on carbon generation seems likely to result in the 
wrong kind of optimization.   Sure, we could generate 1/3 less carbon if 
we only met 2 times per year.   Just think of how much carbon we'd save 
if we never met at all!  And it would be entirely "fair" too, since 
nobody would be excluded because of inability to travel.   Of course 
there are other barriers to effective participation in IETF.   For 
instance it helps to know people...

I'd rather see us focus on how we do our work, to see above all how much 
of our output is actually useful, whether we're working effectively not 
only in person but also via email.   If working more effectively would 
let us complete a WG's work in 1/2 the time, all other things being 
equal, each WG would consume 1/2 the carbon.   We might still meet 3 
times a year (or not) but get more useful work done.

Or it might be that IETF would be more useful to the Internet community 
if it produced fewer RFCs (each of more value) than we do now.

Keith

---

From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2019 07:42:52 -0400

On Jul 26, 2019, at 07:14, Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> After all, the Internet is directly responsible for several % of world energy consumption.

This is a bit like saying the Autobahns are directly responsible for all those car exhausts.

While the operation of the Internet does consume a non-trivial amount of power, much more energy goes into providing the services that are accessed over the Internet (e.g., in “data centers”).  

Improving the Internet can help reduce the energy footprint of providing these services (e.g., by enabling the move of service operation closer to power generation and into regions that need less additional energy for cooling).

(A few of those services can also actually help save energy, but that is pretty much outside the domain of the IETF.)

Computing in the network (see the new COINRG) might help as well.  Too early to say.  We could make energy use a constant consideration for the research in that space, so we learn more about what can be achieved.  

Re our own meeting footprint: We already have one of the best remote participation schemes in the industry, so I think our needs for virtue signaling are covered. Of course, further improvements in our own footprint should be sought whenever we make changes.  But we should focus on the work that actually makes a difference in the grand scheme of things, with a cool-headed engineer’s point of view, and our own footprint vanishes in that global impact.

Grüße, Carsten

---

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2019 13:43:34 +0200

On Fri, Jul 26, 2019 at 11:14:00PM +1200, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> Toerless,
> 
> This thread is not about meetings. 

Eliots tread starter certainly was.

> It's about protocol design and operational recommendations. After all, the Internet is directly responsible for several % of world energy consumption. The exact value is still debatable: https://digital-me-up.com/2019/05/17/invisible-pollution-of-internet/

The Internet is not responsible for the humunguous amount of energy burn
in DC , bitcoin proof of work or end-user equipment. Thats like saying
that streets are responsible for Hummer and Trucks gasoline consumption and
waste of human time in commute traffic.  Sure, the Internet is the
enabler, but its in the nature of the economy that enablers never only
enable good things. How about we get rid of money first, because thats
responsible for financing all wars, much more so than the Internet.

Protocol design and operational recommendations too would have little
impact to reducing power consumption compared to HW-design level
improvements.

Cheers
    Toerless

-- 
---
[email-masked]

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2019 23:57:15 +1200

Toerless,

On 26-Jul-19 23:43, Toerless Eckert wrote:
> in DC , bitcoin proof of work or end-user equipment. 

Correct, in a strict sense, but the Internet caused all that to exist, and IETF protocols are used extensively inside the racks. Same goes for the DCs that support CDNs. I don't think we can get off the hook so easily, but there is certainly no clear boundary between Internet and non-Internet.

Of course this is one reason why the published estimates of the "Internet" energy consumption vary so widely. 

     Brian

> Thats like saying

---

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2019 14:23:04 +0200

On Fri, Jul 26, 2019 at 07:17:47AM -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
> Maybe.   The Internet also consumes a lot of power, both directly (routers,
> servers, etc.) and via things enabled by the Internet (e.g. bitcoin; and
> people keep PCs on now that we have constant connectivity, whereas they used
> to turn them off).  Without a detailed analysis, I see no reason to be
> confident that there's an overall savings in carbon.

See Brians URL. 14% for the whole network vs. whats connected to it.

Of course we are burning a lot more oil now with cars than with horse
carriages, but you are still free to become Amisch. Just don't rely 
on modern medicine when you are sick or anything else that could have been
created only with more modern forms of transportation and communication
than just horse cariages.

Driving to work and back 20 miles (which for US conditions is darn
short), let's say 1Kw ~ 1 gallon on my car which is about 5KwH from 
a simple generator. vs. working from home through the Internet.
My notebook uses maybe 10W/h.  Building and upkeep of highway and cars vs.
the metro IP network would be a lot more numbers to compare, but IMHO an
easy win for the IP network.

> (Whether there's an overall benefit to the public, given all of the issues
> surrounding privacy and political manipulation, might also be up for
> question.   I like having easy access to information and goods and services,
> don't like that nearly everyone's phone and computer is now an eavesdropping
> device.)

Now you're jumping from energy consumption to privacy. I can play the
same game to argue we should revert from current currency systems to shells for
trade. 

> "shaming" can result in a decrease of awareness.   It promotes denial and
> distraction away from other issues that might be worse or more deserving of
> attention.

Not only that. The shaming approach is typically ignoring to look at how
to minimize the negatives without considering the positives or how the
proposed change will impact them.

> It's easy to look at the carbon cost of a single transcontinental airplane
> flight (or of a few flights for IETF) and think "that's too much".   But the
> best way to reduce one's total carbon generation might be, for example, to
> reduce the number of less distant flights one takes in a year.   For
> instance,  travel by train, when that option is available.   Save the
> carbon-generation for the trips that really matter.

Excess money will always find a way to abuse resources. Yes, massive
societal change is the only way to preserve resources, but that is going to 
take a very long time and we first have to figure out how to create a
just society when human labor at large becomes less necessary/valuable.

Toerless

> wrong kind of optimization.   Sure, we could generate 1/3 less carbon if we
> only met 2 times per year.   Just think of how much carbon we'd save if we
> never met at all!  And it would be entirely "fair" too, since nobody would
> be excluded because of inability to travel.   Of course there are other
> barriers to effective participation in IETF.   For instance it helps to know
> people...
>
> 
> I'd rather see us focus on how we do our work, to see above all how much of
> our output is actually useful, whether we're working effectively not only in
> person but also via email.   If working more effectively would let us
> complete a WG's work in 1/2 the time, all other things being equal, each WG
> would consume 1/2 the carbon.   We might still meet 3 times a year (or not)
> but get more useful work done.
> 
> Or it might be that IETF would be more useful to the Internet community if
> it produced fewer RFCs (each of more value) than we do now.
> 
> Keith
> 

-- 
---
[email-masked]

---

From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2019 08:27:00 -0400

Don, others who think three meetings are the right number,

> On 25 Jul 2019, at 10:46, Donald Eastlake <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 

Why three?  Why not four, two, five?

Here is my claim: we can fly less and be more effective.  I am asking simply that the LLC in consultation with the IESG test that statement by finding the right questions, collecting and analyzing data, and then bring the results of their analysis with recommendations to the community for our consideration.

I take seriously the need for hallway conversations, hackathons, ad hocs, in addition to our formal meeting time.  That has to be taken into account.

But it has been some 28 years since we went to three meetings per year.  Let’s please do the work to understand what options we have.  That’s my request.  Do you disagree?

Eliot

---

From: Alexandre Petrescu <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2019 14:34:57 +0200

Le 26/07/2019 à 14:27, Eliot Lear a écrit :
> Here is my claim: we can fly less and be more effective.

I agree.

> I am asking simply that the LLC in consultation with the IESG test
> that statement by finding the right questions, collecting and
> analyzing data, and then bring the results of their analysis with
> recommendations to the community for our consideration.
> 
> I take seriously the need for hallway conversations, hackathons, ad 
> hocs, in addition to our formal meeting time.  That has to be taken 
> into account.

I agree.  I realize for myself that I write differently to a person that
I have already met; I visualize that person and imagine how would the
reception of my message be.

On another hand, when I write to someone I never met (or to a list of 
people) it is in a more neutral manner.  With that, there is a risk that 
the message does not get through, especially if the message is 
relatively complex, as technical things are.

I noticed that the ISOC-trained IETF newcomers now request an individual 
skype session immediately after first contact.  I find that very useful 
before meeting in person.  I wonder if it's ISOC who trained them so, or 
is it by themselves.

> But it has been some 28 years since we went to three meetings per 
> year.  Let’s please do the work to understand what options we have. 
> That’s my request.  Do you disagree?

No.

Alex

---

From: "Deen, Glenn (NBCUniversal)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2019 12:46:44 +0000

On 7/26/19, 8:27 AM, "ietf on behalf of Eliot Lear" <[email-masked] on behalf of [email-masked]> wrote:

    Eliot

[GD] One thing that needs to be considered in this are the benefits to the Internet and IETF participants that take advantage of them of the numerous side meetings and events that take place around an IETF meeting for the simple reason that the IETF critical mass is in town.   There have been interest group workshops, open source events, university workshops, whole conferences in the days before and after, etc.

[GD] We (the IETF) by our presence in a region/city help support and enable much valuable Internet technology and policy work.

[GD] -glenn

---

From: Ole Jacobsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2019 09:38:25 -0400

Timely article:

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/07/22/Climate-Cost-Conferences/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=220719&fbclid=IwAR2qQ1TYMriZPZRtO6NKNsyDhbRK77ImeFdpYtcS_jzuMGsfVNICK9Vpf5Q

Ole J. Jacobsen
Editor & Publisher
The Internet Protocol Journal
Cell: +1 415 370-4628
T-Mobile: +1 415 889-9821
EE UK: +44 7805 977889
Docomo: +81 90 3337 9311‬
http://protocoljournal.org

Sent from my iPhone

---

From: "Salz, Rich" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2019 14:17:13 +0000

>   But it has been some 28 years since we went to three meetings per year.  Let’s please do the work to understand what options we have.  That’s my request.  Do you disagree?
  
I don't disagree. :)

---

From: Jacob Hoffman-Andrews <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2019 13:37:29 -0700

On 7/25/19 9:10 PM, Toerless Eckert wrote:
> the Internet has been the biggest reducer of energy
> and ships ?
If online communications were reducing the need for air travel, we would 
expect to see a significant decrease in air travel since 2000. Instead:

https://www.iea.org/tcep/transport/aviation/
 > Demand for air transport has more than doubled since 2000, and demand 
for both passenger and freight aviation is expected to remain strong in 
the future.

 > In 2018, passenger activity increased by 6.1% to 8.2 trillion revenue 
passenger kilometres, and the number of total air passengers reached a 
record 4.3 billion (ICAO, 2019a). This activity growth is a slowdown 
from the 7.9% increase registered in 2017, however, with regional growth 
rates in 2018 ranging between 4.7% and 7.3%.

I agree that online collaboration has the *potential* to reduce 
emissions. However, it is not fulfilling that potential. That's why we 
need to walk the talk and demonstrate how to collaborate effectively 
online, so other industries can adopt our methods and tools.

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2019 17:08:24 -0400

The work of the IETF is to develop and publish protocol specifications. It
is absolutely unclear to me that the way we're currently going about it is
the most productive approach or produces the best quality documents (or the
most relevant, but that's a separate question).   What we're doing is
certainly expensive, and has a considerable footprint, and it strikes me as
completely reasonable to reexamine the question of work modalities.

At any rate I'd really like to see the discussion anchored to and driven by
what it is we actually do.

Melinda

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 2019 20:39:20 -0400

> Demand for air transport has more than doubled since 2000, and demand

This page does not, unfornately tell us why people are travelling more.
It could be fewer people travelling a lot more, it could be more short-haul
flights.  Anecdotally, I think a lot of it is increased travel for pleasure,
and I think that the Internet *did* cause that, because it's so much easier
to find out about other places and make plans.  And the cost per flight is
lower.

The other question is, could there be, due to the Internet, a lot more people
who are collaborating over distance, and therefore occasionally needing to
meet up in person.  I think so.  One can imagine a collaboration/kilogram-CO2
chart of some kind.

    > online, so  other industries can adopt our methods and tools.

I agree completely.

And, it goes beyond that: we have increasing number of WG meeting conflicts,
because we are no longer so siloed as we were 25 years ago when I started.
So in order to accomodate the cross-area work, we need to stretch our "week"
out.  Making the physical meeting longer isn't going to work, so we need
to do it online.

(And, we need to lead people back towards useful non-HTML emails,
where content matters instead of form, and quoting is sensibly done.
*WE* know how to do email collaboration, the LookOut people don't.
Wes has started writing in Markdown...)

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 2019 02:41:41 +0000 (UTC)

To be the most productive and produce the best-quality documents. we’d need an RFC Editor.

Lloyd [email-masked],uk

On Saturday, July 27, 2019, 07:08, Melinda Shore <[email-masked]> wrote:

The work of the IETF is to develop and publish protocol specifications. It is absolutely unclear to me that the way we're currently going about it is the most productive approach or produces the best quality documents (or the most relevant, but that's a separate question).   What we're doing is certainly expensive, and has a considerable footprint, and it strikes me as completely reasonable to reexamine the question of work modalities.  
At any rate I'd really like to see the discussion anchored to and driven by what it is we actually do.
Melinda

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 27 Jul 2019 11:37:47 -0400

Noting Melinda's comment about what we actually do -- with while
I strongly agree, I've been intermittently following the
question of how improved two-way or multiway international
communication changes travel patterns.  The story goes back to
the realization that, with email and (even) first-generation
list management and Usenet systems, communication and working
with someone halfway around the world could be as inexpensive,
and often as efficient, as working with someone who lived next
door.  The number of international collaborations increased.
Because of the value of f2f conversations identified in a
different thread in the last few days,  so did travel to
meetings that previously would have involved mostly or entirely
people from a rather small region.

At least in retrospect (but there were scholars in the 80s and
earlier who predicted it), what would we expect?

We tend to praise the increase in international collaborations
and other interactions and curse the increased travel, but they
may go together.

   john

--On Friday, 26 July, 2019 13:37 -0700 Jacob Hoffman-Andrews
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>  > In 2018, passenger activity increased by 6.1% to 8.2
> trillion revenue passenger kilometres, and the number of total
> air passengers reached a record 4.3 billion (ICAO, 2019a).
> This activity growth is a slowdown from the 7.9% increase
> registered in 2017, however, with regional growth rates in
> 2018 ranging between 4.7% and 7.3%.
> 
> I agree that online collaboration has the *potential* to
> reduce emissions. However, it is not fulfilling that
> potential. That's why we need to walk the talk and demonstrate
> how to collaborate effectively online, so other industries can
> adopt our methods and tools.