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RE: Requirement to go to meetings (was: Re: Anotherj RFP without IETF community input)

2011-10-23 10:33:05


--On Sunday, October 23, 2011 07:05 -0700 "Murray S. Kucherawy"
<msk(_at_)cloudmark(_dot_)com> wrote:

...
Tough call.  I completely understand the need and desire to be
productive without requiring meetings, for all the financial,
participation, and other reasons given.  But I also am very
familiar with the fact that getting work done on lists can be
a real challenge: People get sidetracked and can take days,
weeks, or even months to answer something that's holding up a
working group.

I suspect decisions get made in person because people show up,
perhaps out of fear that they will have missed an opportunity
to be heard or influence a key decision.  There's a feeling
that meetings produce action items, where in the list
environment action items get assigned when consensus gets
around to warranting it.

If you're sitting on a mailing list and someone asks you to
provide a document review by some date and you say nothing,
there's no indication of whether or not you even got the
request.  If you're sitting in a meeting room and someone asks
you to provide a document review by some date, that person is
likely to get an answer from you right away.

In short: Meetings don't stall, but lists do.  And I think,
therefore, that many people find the meetings important,
perhaps enough so that they save all their WG energy for the
meetings.

I don't think it's best for maximum participation, especially
given the costs of the meetings as per discussion in the other
thread, but I understand why it is that way.

Murray, fwiw, your analysis doesn't require f2f meetings.  If it
could be done, well-conducted virtual/remote meetings would work
as well because they, too involve fixed cutoffs, real-time
responses, and opportunity to confront those who may not be
responding, etc.

At the other extreme, of course, we could adopt the model used
by a few other standards bodies (and perhaps left over when
"mailing list" meant "distribution of documents by post"), stop
expecting anything at all from mailing lists, and hold week-long
(or longer) meetings that the WG level in which we expected all
of the work to get done :-(

    john


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