Re: Proposed Experiment: More Meeting Time on Friday for IETF 73

Fred,

> So, you are asserting that the primary working groups that I interact 
> with, of which v6ops is typical, are all outliers.
> I suspect that the story of several blind wise men describing an 
> elephant is relevant here. My view of the elephant is as I described. 
> Your view of the elephant may vary.
> To be honest, I think the body that has the best collective view is 
> the IESG and/or the IAB. Reason: as a group, they monitor all working 
> groups and they collectively compare notes. I am prone to let them 
> make the assessment. The point has been made in this thread and in 
> others that there is a perception that working groups are in many 
> cases inefficient, and if one of them is reading the thread maybe they 
> can chime in to say "got that".
I guess anyone who attends a lot of groups could have an opinion here. 
From my point of view, we do have *some* WGs and sessions where time is 
typically not being used effectively. Focus on status reports, 
introduction to the topic (though sometimes that is justified), not 
organized enough to make progress in an issue, no progress between 
meetings, etc. In my area, we canceled the meeting of one WG which had 
these issues.
However, I think the *common case* is that WGs do have useful 
discussions. I looked at my own WGs, and 90% have significant issues in 
the agenda. Some have a lot to discuss, some have less.
I guess you could also look at how well the WGs run their discussions, 
even if they have topics suitable for f2f discussion. I can see some 
problems -- language issues, every now and then the presentations are 
confused, AV problems, wasting time on a side issue and not talking 
about the key problems, etc. But I'd say its human nature and its very 
hard to run a meeting so that everything goes perfectly.
Up-leveling a bit, if you have a hard technical problem to solve, having 
six (3x2) or seven and a half (3x2.5) hours f2f time a year is very 
little. Try to run a project with that much f2f time! Particularly when 
people have different backgrounds and different network pictures in 
their heads. Its takes time to understand what the other people are 
saying. It takes time to develop solutions to problems. Of course, a 
(well-run) IETF WG does a lot of its work on the list and through 
documents. But you also need some f2f time to go with that.
Among the various development efforts that I've been involved with 
(product development projects, standards bodies, research projects, 
policy development), the IETF probably has the lowest f2f/list effort 
ratio. My opinion is that the ratio should increase a bit, at least for 
some WGs. This thread is largely about how that could be arranged (via 
teleconferences, interim meetings, lengthening the meeting, trading some 
other time from the agenda to WG meetings, etc).
Jari

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