At 9:32 AM -0800 7/30/10, Melinda Shore wrote:
The implication that there needs to be a session, with a room
and slides and humans sitting in chairs, kind of suggests that
people who want to participate in the IETF have to attend
meetings.
"participate" is too strong a word. Scheduled-but-ad-hoc BoFs now have the
same unfortunate properties of many WGs, namely that 80+% of the people
there are only there to listen, not help.
Double bingo. The number of WG sessions (which are ostensibly scheduled
for the purpose of "working") in which folks have not read the drafts or
otherwise prepared themselves to actively contribute is also distressingly
high. Perhaps we all simply have too much work to do, or perhaps many
drafts are written in such a way that folks can't easily grok the problem
and its proposed solution. Regarding the latter, one of the WGs I advise
held a small "tutorial" session in a side room on Friday morning and that
turned out to be quite useful because it forced some of the key
contributors (in this case the chairs) to clearly explain the core
concepts behind the protocol under development within the WG, and I think
that effort will pay off in the form of a much clearer and more readable
specification.
Peter
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf