On 2/16/13 12:04 AM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
On 15/02/2013 20:57, Keith Moore wrote:
...
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.
In v6ops we require that scheduled material to be discussed in the
meeting have been aired out on the mailing list first. That is a rather
good filter for which discussions about new work should be accepted. The
time between meetings is ultimately a lot more scalable and less
precious than the time during meetings. while there is certainly the
opportunity for WG discussion to go where it needs to, one does not plan
a trip to the IETF on the basis of impromptu MIC time.
This is closely related to a well-known problem at academic conferences.
Many people can only get funded to travel if they are presenting a paper.
It's common practice, therefore, to have either a poster session (which
allows massively parallel presentations) or hot-topics sessions (with a
strict and very short time-limit). We tend to throw the hot-topics sessions
into WG meetings, which is not ideal.
There is literally no editorial barrier to the submission of an internet
draft. Moreover the typical basis for the dicussion of an idea on a
mailing list or in a WG meeting is that it exists as an internet draft.
Why not have a poster session as part of Bits-n-Bites? It would give
new ideas a chance to be seen without wasting WG time. Make it official
enough that people can use it in their travel requests.
Brian