At 11:20 AM 12/19/00 -0600, Pete Resnick wrote:
How about a first step: In WG sessions that I chair, there are going to be
no more presentations. From now on, one week before the IETF meeting,
document editors will be required to send me a list of outstanding issues
they wish to discuss in the WG session for their particular drafts.
Having just enthusiastically encouraged Pete to be chair of a nascent
working group that I am heavily involved in, and having noted the many
responses in support of his suggestion, I will nonetheless note that we are
focusing entirely too much on symptoms and not enough on causes.
A very major good feature of the IETF is its flexibility. A working group
needs only enough bureaucratic cruft to get its job done. This varies
enormously, depending upon the background and views of the participants,
complexity of the work to be done, degree of urgency, etc.
I believe that the core requirement for meeting time use is to properly
view it as a very scarce resource and apply agenda design -- and
enforcement -- rules -- that make sense.
Sometimes presentations are exactly the right thing. Sometimes they
aren't. What is important is taking a skeptical view of ALL requests for
meeting time and adding items to the agenda only when the need for them is
compelling.
At 12:12 PM 12/19/00 -0600, Pete Resnick wrote:
On 12/19/00 at 12:04 PM -0500, Scott Brim wrote:
I would suggest that chairs try setting the agenda around issues,
I think you have this backwards. The job of an IETF WG is not to resolve
issues per se; it's to write Internet-Drafts.
Please note that Scott was commenting on a possible format for meetings; he
was not commenting on larger, working group goals. In particular he was
trying to suggest a way to focus the very short time of meetings.
I'll guess that his suggestion was motivated by the tendency to have
per-document agendas spend more time on each document -- in the legitimate
but misguided goal of being "thorough" -- than is really necessary.
d/
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Dave Crocker <dcrocker(_at_)brandenburg(_dot_)com>
Brandenburg Consulting <www.brandenburg.com>
Tel: +1.408.246.8253, Fax: +1.408.273.6464