On 02/15/2013 12:46 PM, George, Wes wrote:
[WEG] Perhaps it would be helpful to make an informal recommendation to WG chairs (via
the wiki, for example) that generally they should carve each request for agenda time
roughly in half, with a hard limit of $speaker_time/2 devoted to "presenting"
or otherwise framing the discussion and the remaining time devoted to open mic
discussion. Likely this will result in presenters asking for 2x their previous time, but
at least it will be a more realistic method to plan out time during a meeting and reduce
the instances where the WG will be running short of time for meaningful discussion if the
presenter (or WG chair) isn't good at managing the available time and spends the whole
allocation reading slides to the people in attendance.
I actually don't think a hard limit is a good idea. WGs need more
presentation time in their early phases.
But this makes me realize that there's a related issue. An expectation
that WG meetings are for presentations, leads to an expectation that
there's lots of opportunity to present suggestions for new work to do.
WG time scheduled for considering new work can actually take away time
for discussion of ongoing work. And once the time is scheduled and
people have made commitments to travel to meetings for the purpose of
presenting new work, chairs are understandably reluctant to deny them
their allotted presentation time.
(It seems like every time I attend an IETF there are numerous WG
meetings with schedules full of presentations for new work that are
hardly even listened to, and that those presentations crowd out
discussion of ongoing work. When the alloted time for such discussion
has elapsed, the chair will sigh and say "ok, let's take that to the
mailing list".)
I suggest that ongoing work should nearly always take precedence over
consideration of new work, particularly for new work that's not fairly
close to the current scope of the WG's charter.
It follows that chairs probably shouldn't schedule all of their allotted
meeting time by filling otherwise unused time with presentations of
proposals for new work. The amount of time required for discussion is
difficult to predict, and often runs over that anticipated. A better
strategy might be this: List the major issues that need to be sorted
out in face-to-face discussion, probably in order of importance (how
much is this particular issue blocking WG progress on its chartered
goals?) combined with some sense of how likely the group is to make
progress. Allot maybe 5 minutes for each topic for presentation time
(introduction of the discussion), to be followed by the actual
discussion. Each discussion gets cut off after some pre-determined
amount of time, or when the chair determines that it's unlikely to
produce any useful progress.
If there's time left over after everything has been discussed, and the
WG is close to finishing its chartered goals, the chair can invite
speakers to briefly present proposals for new work. But in general a WG
shouldn't preallocate time for such presentations in WG meetings - they
should rather be discussed in separate BOF sessions.
Keith