Nah, a working group of last resort is when you create your own
standards organization to work on it.
Or in some cases that is a first resort. I find it rather amusing to
find the number of such efforts that were started with the idea that
they had to move faster than the existing standards orgs could allow
and then end up spending their first two to three years essentially
stalled while they work out all the infrastructure issues they could
have had for free.
But I digress.
If the purpose of the exercise is to do design then you really don't
want more then five people and you probably don't want to tell anyone
else about it.
But before you do design you need to know about the requirements and
constraints that affect your proposal. And for that it is useful to
have the largest number of people possible.
In most cases though, the reason you want a working group is to get
buy-in for the eventual solution. Design is easy. Getting the designs
deployed is very hard. Some working groups realize this and take
deployment very seriously. Others do not.
On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 4:47 AM, Yoav Nir <ynir(_at_)checkpoint(_dot_)com> wrote:
On Aug 1, 2010, at 9:45 AM, Melinda Shore wrote:
Yoav Nir wrote:
Who's "folks"? A lot of people come to an IETF meeting, and are
only following one or two of the working groups. That does not mean
that they sit in their hotel rooms for the rest of the meeting.
Instead, they pick what looks like interesting meetings, and go
there, with the hope of catching something interesting.
That's a really good point, actually. I've also made a
point in the past of attending at least one session
completely unrelated to what I'm working on, in hopes of
learning something or getting new ideas or new associations
or something. But still, it seems to me that there are
two somewhat but not quite orthogonal questions here: 1)
whether or not the increasing formalization of the bar
BOF reflects an increased expectation of attendance in
order to participate/advance work in the IETF, and 2) what
a working group meeting is.
I'll pass on answering #2, but as for #1, I think the bar BoF "institution"
is mis-used as a working group of last resort. If I can't present my idea at
a regular working group (because of time constraints or because it doesn't
fit the charter of any current WG), and I can't present it at the area
gathering (for lack of space), adding a "bar BoF" to the wiki seems to be the
only way. In the end we don't get a lot of discussion - merely a presentation
+ Q&A session. And still the "right" people are often not there.
So formalizing a bunch of presentations is a good thing, although I think it
needs to be done differently.
Formalizing a bunch of people throwing ideas around (the "true" bar BoF) is
not a good thing.
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