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Re: Poster sessions

2011-01-10 08:02:24
To be blunt, if someone is holding a bar BoF without making it primarily a focus for discussion, they are missing the benefit of a Bar BoF. Yes, we have a lot of "bar bofs." And to the degree people are using these as unapproved BoFs for presenting their ideas to a wider audience, rather than for small group discussions in order to figure out what takes place, I think folks are making a mistake. (The existence of, or attendance at, such a pre-BoF is basically irrelevant to the process of getting a BoF or working group at a future IETF.) In fact, whether they get called that or not, we have a very large number of very effective, ad hoc, bar bofs where a group of people working on a topic get together to work on a set of issues around that topic. If this is not yete a topic that the IETF is working on, then often the issues include figuring out more clearly what the problem is, so that it can be effectively presented to the IETF.

I think that the requester is asking for some way to have a large number of different individuals briefly present their ideas, somewhat informally, to the community, to see if there is interest in the idea. In principle, this sounds good. It is indeed one of the functions of the area meetings, but that does not mean we can not do something additional. However, when I try to work out the logistics of such a thing, at the scale of the IETF, my head starts to hurt. We would not want it to conflict with any working group sessions, for example, since there could be "posters" on any imaginable topic. And we would want some filtering, since there are many ideas that, while interesting, belong in other fora (NANOG does review, limit, and select their lightning talks, for example.) And it is not clear how one would use such a session to take thing forward. Finding a more effective way to get early ideas useful airing in the community seems like a very good thing for the community, and would help encourage new ideas.

Yours,
Joel

On 1/10/2011 8:47 AM, Yoav Nir wrote:

On Jan 10, 2011, at 1:22 PM, Loa Andersson wrote:

ALl,

what is here called "poster session" reminds me a awful lot of the
bar bof's we been running for a long time.

No coincidence. There's been a lot of criticism of these bar BoFs, and we keep 
looking for better ways to present new ideas.

Anyone care to draw the line between the two and try to motivate why
we need boths. As I see nothing stops from bringing a poster to a bar
bof, or a white board for taht matter.

Despite the name, a bar BoF today is very much lecture-style. You have a 
presentation and a time for questions. There's really very little room for 
actual discussion (which supposedly happens later in some mailling list). A 
poster session allows for conversation with the I-D author, which may or may 
not lead to better results.


/Loa


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