[Merely observing, not proposing anything...]
If your last point is true, it suggests a model more like the W3C
technical plenary, in which the general format is an all-day plenary
in the middle of the week, preceded and followed by parallel 2-day
(sometimes 1-day) working group sessions for those WGs with
face-to-face work to conduct. Frequent coffee breaks and on-site
lunches provide opportunity for informal cross-WG interactions.
(This seems to work well for W3C, but that doesn't necessarily
translate to IETF modi operandi, with their far grater emphasis on
core business conducted in email.) The face-to-face meetings are
commonly supported by IRC for recording and remote participants.
Also merely observing, not proposing anything...
When we are not devoting the majority of our plenary time to process
reform or administrative restructuring, we actually do have technical
discussions that can (and should) involve much of the community. I
don't know if having a full-day technical plenary would translate to
IETF mode, but another choice might be a half-day technical plenary
mid-week.
And, having said this ... one significant difference between the IETF
model and the IEEE model (as of two years ago, I haven't been
attending recently) is that IEEE working groups usually rev documents
once or twice while they are together face-to-face, one idea being to
make sure that we are all on the same page while we can still have
ANOTHER high-bandwidth exchange to resolve issues that came up with a
new revision.
Some working groups do this in spite of the ID blackout period (by
posting URLs to working group mailing lists), but the ID blackout
period does seem to say we're not terribly interested in making sure
that we have "agreement in the room", before we try to achieve
"consensus on the mailing list".
I know there are lots of working groups that meet once during an IETF
week, but most of the SIP community working groups meet twice, and at
this IETF, the meeting pairs were closely grouped (SIP and SIMPLE were
Monday-Tuesday, SIPPING was Thursday-Friday). I wish we had a little
more hang time to talk during the week, and maybe work things out
before an end-of-week slot.
Spencer
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