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Re: comments on Friday scheduling, etc.

2002-01-17 19:40:02

On Thursday, January 17, 2002, at 02:04 , Jeffrey Altman wrote:
I find that in order to get better airline rates I am forced to travel
into town on Saturday.  So I'm in town on Sunday ...
So maybe doing more on Sunday would be a possibility.

I believe that (at least for US-homed travellers) the wacky airline
pricing means that many many people (not everyone, but surely a whole
lot) are travelling on Saturday.  The remainder generally arrive
some time on Sunday afternoon.  The Sunday evening social seems to
be regularly well attended.

IEPG typically holds its small meeting on the Sunday before IETF,
often 10am until 2pm.  There have occasionally been IESG or IAB
closed working meetings on either Saturday or Sunday.  I'm sure
there are business meetings on EVERY day/evening of IETF, but that
doesn't strike me as a major driver for the IETF week schedule.

Doing something on Sunday might create more options.  Quite separately,
it was true in the past that IETF would have one or more morning plenary
meetings (which could be attempted again).
        - Reception & Social might be merged together on Sunday evening.
        - Sunday's social might be followed by one of the plenary meetings.
        - Sunday's social might be followed by a short administrative
          plenary, covering routine topics (e.g. local host/IANA/RFC-
Editor/Secretariat updates).
        - Sunday's social might be followed by one of the plenary meetings,
          with the routine topics (e.g. IANA/RFC-Editor/local host/Secretariat)
          covered at a (possibly shorter than usual for modern plenaries)
          Monday morning plenary meeting.

The problem with Friday is that after having spent a week at IETF I
really want to either get back home or to my weekend destination at a
reasonable hour.  That usually means getting on a plane by 11am if not
earlier.  So regardless of how important the Friday meeting is, I
probably won't be attending it.

This is true for lots of folks. In particular, US folks that have been forced (by finances) to engage in the Saturday-night-stay to get cheaper airfare are worn out by Thursday evening and usually head home Friday morning. Domestic
tranquility at home (and concerns about Sabbath for some) cause many folks
to flood out on Friday morning so that they are home before dinner (or
Friday local sundown at home). For folks heading out Friday morning at dawn,
and there are a whole lot of folks who do roughly that, evening meetings
(e.g. IAB plenary in SLC) on Thursday evening are a real problem.

In 10+ years of IETF meetings, missing a small number now and again, I've
never attended a Friday IETF meeting. Further, I can't imagine ever doing so unless that IETF happened to be local to my home. I did attend a closed IRTF meeting on one Friday after IETF, but that was local to my home. On that occasion,
the halls seemed notably empty by 10am Friday.

I am afraid the bottom line is ugly. This really really is a zero-sum game.
If there are two plenary meetings on different nights, then that removes a
night's worth of WG meeting slots from the calendar. We can accept the loss of those WG meeting slots, as one option. Another option would be to re-shuffle some of the other items (either WG meetings or a plenary or both plenaries or all of the above) to make Sunday evening into an IETF time rather than a free timeslot. One or both plenary meetings could move to Sunday evening or some daytime slot,
shuffling some WGs from day to night meetings if the latter were chosen.
The final option, which the sentiment here so far does not seem to favour,
 is
to put the two plenaries back to back on the same night.

I strongly suspect that there are some limits to what scheduling flexibility,
if any, remains for IETF/MSP in March.  I'm sure the IETF Chair and the
Secretariat will do something reasonable.

Cheers,

Ran
rja(_at_)inet(_dot_)org