Two observations, merely historical, rather than suggestions for
the present or future...
--On Monday, 21 March, 2005 06:36 -0600 Spencer Dawkins
<spencer(_at_)mcsr-labs(_dot_)org> wrote:
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.
FWIW, we used to hold one or two technical plenary sessions
during IETF meetings, typically in daytime slots and typically
separate from the "throw ripe fruit at the IESG" session (which
used to be a lot less passive than it has been in recent years).
They were gradually phased out in favor of more WG sessions.
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".
The ancient historical origin of the posting deadlines was
simply the fact that the secretariat could not simultaneously
get I-Ds posted and operate a meeting. For some time, we had a
site, usually operated by volunteers on a rotating basis, to
which unedited updated drafts and other materials could be
posted immediately before and during the meeting only. The
greater amount of IETF activity (number of WGs and attendance)
and more hostile environment today would probably require more
procedures and/or human involvement today, but the intent was to
be make to get late updates and during-meeting updates,
available on an almost immediate basis. Perhaps we have lost
something by letting those mechanisms quietly atrophy. Speaking
personally, I certainly see no problem with the "post URL to WG
mailing list" or even "post document to WG web page" approaches,
although it would be nice to have repositories available for
those who don't have ready access to places where documents can
be posted during IETF meetings.
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.
Even for those that meet only once, there are usually
opportunities for pre-session and post-session informal
discussions. And those discussions -- among design or editing
teams or informal gatherings of participants -- are, as others
have observed, where a lot of our real work gets done, at least
at the level of fine details.
john
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