Fred,
I agree with your remarks.
Basically, we need
1. cheaper airfare ( we need 21 days )
2. some of us cannot stay for the whole week
so knowing the full agenda earlier is a good thing.
abbie
-----Original Message-----
From: Fred Douglis [mailto:douglis(_at_)research(_dot_)att(_dot_)com]
Sent: Monday, November 05, 2001 3:58 PM
To: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: earlier agendas
Before the last IETF meeting I asked some IETFers in my
company about the
rationale for having the final IETF schedule so close to the
meeting date that
one can't necessarily get a reduced-fare ticket for the days
one would want to
be there. I heard back that this is indeed a dead horse, so
I guess I'm
beating it publicly this time....
Perhaps a while back it was a given that people could afford
the time and
money to attend IETF for the entire week, and therefore the
specific agenda is
not so important. And various people say how important the
cross-fertilization is, and how terrible it would be if
people went to the
IETF meeting just for a WG meeting or two and then went home.
I've heard this viewpoint before, and I sympathize, but I
think the whole scale
of the IETF has shifted dramatically, and the IETF should be
pragmatic. When
there were 500 people attending, and they could all come for
a week and know
everything that's going on, that was fine. But the economic
realities can
impinge on a company's ability to send dozens of people
across an ocean (or
even halfway across a continent) for a week at a time (though
I do grant that
if you do it for a week, at least you can get the cheap
airfare :), and the
people who participate have ever-increasing other demands on
their time.
Has anyone done a study to get an idea of what fraction of
attendees currently
stay for what fraction of time? This might shed some light
on the subject.
It's one thing to decree that it's a good idea, and it's
another thing to
recognize that in practice maybe that's not the way it works
anymore...
BTW, I also heard that WG/BOF chairs would kvetch if they had
to ask for a
slot earlier. I can't buy this whatsoever -- if the whole
schedule were known
well in advance to start and end two weeks earlier, where's the pain?
Fred