Re: Ad Hoc BOFs

Fred,

I have mixed feelings about this. I had a tough week, particularly with 
lunches and dinner times packed with more meetings than usual. I already 
complained to Ray that they had made the system too efficient. You could 
now get lunch sandwich from the cafeteria in five minutes, making it 
possible to join a meeting during lunch break. Please be sure to include 
"only slow restaurants" in the meeting selection criteria for future 
meetings, so that we can have our lunch break back :-) Other problems 
that I saw during the week with the ad hoc BOFs include people 
consistently referring to the meetings as "BOFs", without making a 
distinction between a real BOF and an unofficial side meeting, some ADs 
worrying about conflicts and lack of scheduling for the ad hoc meetings, 
and some repetition of same proposals from the previous IETF without 
apparent progress.
That being said, in this meeting I saw more new things than I have seen 
for a while. I also felt that while I was busy and tired, I had made the 
right personal scheduling choices. For the record, I only participated 
three out of eight possible Internet area related side meetings, due to 
lack of time/other meetings and in few cases because I felt I needed to 
give myself some rest.
But we should also think about this a bit more than provide anecdotes. 
Lets think about the effect of the having side meetings to begin with, 
make a list of these meetings public, the location, and leadership 
participation separately. I think we all agree that having such meetings 
is great. That is how IETF gets the next wave of interesting topics to 
work on. We absolutely need the ability for hallway conversations, bar 
meetings, and the like.
I was responsible for making the list of meetings public. For the record 
I still do have mixed feelings about this. I have heard many people 
state that we should rather have smaller meetings and that its the 
public part of these meetings that drives up the participant count and 
makes the meeting more formal. Maybe so. I will point out, however, that 
one function of the public listing is to find a similarly interested 
discussion partner. Some people in the IETF are very well connected and 
may not need that, but I'm not sure that's true of everyone.
The location. I personally like having food in a small gathering, in a 
nice environment. That being said, the only real bar BoF that I attended 
was horrible in terms of being able to hear what the other people said. 
We had a dozen people, and I could not hear what the other end of the 
table said, multiple sets of people talked in parallel, etc. In the 
meetings that happened at the meeting rooms I was always able to 
understand what others were saying (though maybe not what their idea was 
:-) In general, I think one of the biggest values of the IETF is that we 
can put people together. I have no problem asking the secretariat to 
give one of our unused rooms for some ad hoc meeting if the participants 
believe it makes them move things forward.
Participation. As you can tell from above, I do not feel capable (or 
even obliged) of attending all these meetings. I try to make the most 
important ones, but you are on your own if you organizing an unofficial 
meeting. Just like you have always been. I know some other ADs have 
worried about scheduling conflicts with directorates and actual 
meetings. I'm not sure I want to see these meeting scheduled in any 
particular manner. If someone wants me to be somewhere, they better make 
sure I know when it is, why I should be there, and that I have no 
conflicts at that time. I do think that we should not schedule 
unofficial meetings against working group meetings. Looking at the bar 
BOF wiki, it does not seem that this was happening too much.
Jari

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