Re: Meeting format (Re: Moving from "hosts" to "sponsors")

Brian E Carpenter wrote:

Andy,

As I hope everybody knows, about 60% of the IASA budget
comes from meeting fees, and we must make enough surplus on
the meetings to fund the secretariat. So, if we did
decide to change the nature of any of our meetings, we'd
really have to understand the budget implications. That being
said, we should certainly explore alternatives to the present
way of doing things. My own experience as a WG chair is that
interim meetings are highly effective when starting out on a
new effort and consensus has to be reached on fundamentals.
I'm less convinced that longer meetings are useful when
refining complex documents - that is when editorial teams
and issue trackers seem to be effective. As I said the other
day, cross-fertilization remains important. It's hard to imagine
how we could run multiple in-depth meetings in parallel
without losing cross-fertilization.

Maybe we could experiment with a meeting with one day (out of
4.5) dedicated to 7 in-depth WG meetings, and the other 3.5
days "traditional"?



This would be great.
If we could get the sponsors who who have paid for
the entire interim meeting costs somewhere else chip in,
the the IETF could extend room and network services until
8 PM Friday, and we could have "Interim Friday".   This
would have the least impact on regular IETF activities.
Since only dedicated people show up to interims anyway,
holding them on Friday won't impact the masses in the slightest.

Of course, you would need volunteer WGs who even want to
have a 1 day interim instead of a 2 hour slot in Montreal.
(NETCONF WG volunteers right now ;-)

(IMO, BOFs should be early in the week, not on Friday.
Cross-area review of new ideas is just as important as
anything else.)


   Brian


Andy


Andy Bierman wrote:

Harald Alvestrand wrote:

Andy Bierman wrote:
Ray Pelletier wrote:
...
A more workable model would be to treat the current
type of meeting as an Annual Plenary, full of Power-Point
laden 2 hour BOFs, and status meetings of almost no value
in the production of standards-track protocols.

The other 2 IETFs would be Working Group Meetings.
Essentially, this as a collection of WG Interim Meetings.
WGs meet for 1-3 days and mash through documents and
get them done fast.  Decisions validated on the WG mailing
list within 2 weeks of IETF Friday.
are you seeing these as meetings of *all* WGs, or do you envisionmultiple meetings, each with some subset of WGs?If (guesstimate) 50 of 120 WGs decide to meet in this format, thenumber of parallell tracks at one monster meeting will run between 15and 30.



There would need to be lots of overlap.  Lots of preparation
for joint-meetings would be needed.  Not everybody
can work on everything at once.  (More accurately, most
people won't be able to read email while ignoring the
meeting in as many WGs. ;-)

Meeting slots would be divided into 3 categories, times, allocations,
and proportions decided by the IESG.

  - WG
  - intra-area
  - inter-area

This might even lead to more shared work, more cross area review,
more consistency. You know -- proper Engineering.

(Maybe we have way too many WGs.
That problem is out of scope here.)


It should take 1 year to get a standards-track RFC out the door.
Not 6+ years.  The solution is obvious.  Quit messing around
and get some work done.   This turtle pace has got to end.
Interim meetings should not be a almost-never way to get
work done.  Any IETF veteran knows it's the only way
anything gets done around here.

I'm intrigued by the idea of replacing one or more IETF meetings with"large interims", but would like to work through exactly what's beingproposed. (Of course, scheduling 2 years out DOES interfere with"quick" experiments....)


The meeting slot allocation (General Agenda)
is set in stone 30 days in advance of IETF Sunday.
BOF agendas are due 30 days in advance of IETF Sunday.
WG agendas are due 15 days in advance of IETF Sunday.
No exceptions.

....and cancellation on those WGs who do not provide such agendas?Just checking....


Remote audio and jabber for all meetings of course,
and better remote meeting participation tools over time.
If the meeting fees could be lowered over time because
smaller venues are needed 2 out of 3 IETFs, then more
people will be able to participate.

The meeting fee represented 41% of the total cost of
my attendance to IETF 65.  IMO, sponsors at the Plenary
meeting would be appropriate, and could help the IETF
fund a cheaper, more stable, IETF-controlled, conference.


My cost for this meeting (VERY rough, off the top of my head):

- Hotel: 800 dollars
- Food: 400 dollars
- Airfare: 1200 dollars
- Meeting fee: 550 dollars
- Misc: 50 dollars

Total: 3000 dollars. Meeting fee percentage: 18%.

But we've been around the "how much does the meeting fee matter" bushbefore.



Next time I go to Europe instead of US, our expense ratios
will be reversed.  These 2 data points aren't meaningful.

Cheaper is better, and how much it matters varies widely between people.

                       Harald




Andy

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