I fully agree with what Henning proposes. However, I am not sure it would be
practical. Namely, folks get their employers to pay for going to IETF to get
work done. Will that still happen if the meeting becomes, "What's going on in
the IETF?" I know when I was in startup mode, the holder of my purse said,
"Buy and read the proceedings" when I wanted to go to a technical conference
where I was not presenting.
Because of this (or maybe I've got the symptom confused with the cause), WG
meetings have become face-to-face work session: "Read all the documents, all
the e-mails, and absolutely NO tutorials in your presentation" is the mantra of
many work groups.
That said, I have purposely scheduled tutorials in some of my work groups when
the technology, OR BUSINESS DRIVER, is obscure but significantly impacts the
direction of our work. I made a point of inviting those whom I expected to
balk at our work product if they did not know why we want that route. So far,
that has been successful.
On 1/8/07 3:02 PM, "Henning Schulzrinne" <hgs(_at_)cs(_dot_)columbia(_dot_)edu>
wrote:
I think it is helpful to distinguish at least three types of IETF
work products:
(1) fully new protocols, at the level of (say) MPLS or NSIS
(2) extensions of existing protocols, such as a new DHCP option or a
new RTP payload type (another huge fraction of our current activities)
(3) "bis" versions of existing protocols (a very large chunk of our
current repertoire)
Some efforts will fall somewhere in-between, but I suspect that we're
mainly worried about (1), and maybe (3) ["ten years hence, what have
we learned and should we scrap the old stuff instead of adding a
layer of paint"].
Fortunately or unfortunately, the number of concurrent (1) efforts is
very small.
Currently, WG and IETF meetings could be a good opportunity to get
people to do cross-area review, as they are in IETF mode. However, we
seem to have intentionally or unintentionally made this difficult.
In WG meetings, we'
ns that the same three people that have been arguing some
angels-on-a-pin point on the mailing list, having lost everybody
else, take turns at the microphone, while the remaining 247 people in
the audience are paying full attention - to their email. I would find
it much more helpful to have the ability to walk into a WG as an
interested party that's not on a mailing list and catch up quickly.
Interim meetings and phone conferences often seem better suited to
that level of detail, particularly for large WGs.
Similarly, in the plenaries, we rehash NAT and RFC-over-HTML
arguments or learn about the number of enterprise numbers that have
been assigned. That time might be better spent in giving not just the
IRTF slot time, but also any (1) and significant (3) development,
with an emphasis on the architectural issues being raised by the
effort and maybe an attempt to highlight the big-ticket open issues.
Right now, the only time this tends to happen, at best, is during the
BOF, which is usually and hopefully too early.
Henning
necessarily interested in the subject area are few and far between.
Extra documents don't help much, either, because they're *strongly*
resented by WG members who see them as just more process imposed by
the
IESG.
I tried several things myself when I was AD. If I were still AD, I'd
keep trying. But I don't have any new ideas, and I'm skeptical of
repeating old ones.
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
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