Re: Interim meetings - changing the way we work

The OpenConfig team you are pointing at is a design team, not a workinggroup. And they do understand that all the decisions they have madeneed to be reviewed by a working group if they want IETF publication.


Yours,
Joel

On 2/26/15 4:48 PM, Thomas D. Nadeau wrote:

On Feb 26, 2015:4:30 PM, at 4:30 PM, Joel M. Halpern 
<jmh(_at_)joelhalpern(_dot_)com> wrote:

Thomas, if participants who can not make the conference calls are obliged to 
listen to the full recordings to get the key points of what has happened, why, 
what are the questions, and similar issues that need to be visible to the WG, 
then we are not running an inclusive process that allows for participation by 
the range of individuals we need.


        That is the problem. We're really only geared to have full-on, in 
person meetings all the time. That does not lend itself to being 
flexible/agile.  That is not to say that I want to exclude anyone, but to be 
fair, if a subset of people want to move a pile of work forward, we shouldn't 
ENCOURAGE that behavior not stifle.

There is a reason that the IETF distinguishes between design teams meetings, 
where the design team has to explain their work carefully to the WG, and 
working group meetings.  There has always been a problem of not getting as much 
context as we would like from the WG minutes.  But since we explicitly take all 
resolutions to the list, this is ameliorated by folks being able to ask for 
explanations, by those issues being taken to the list promptly, and by the fact 
that we only met 3 times a year.  If you have bi-weekly calls and the WG can 
not tell what is going on with those calls, then what you have is a design 
team.  And then the folks involved need to own up to it as a design team, 
understand that they need to explain to the list what they have analyzed, their 
reasoning, and their conclusions.


        Design teams should be able to work asynchronously, but with fixed schedules and 
not have to have everything explicitly documented at every step. If someone else is 
curious, they can get involved but not in order to slow things down or throw a monkey 
wrench into the works. If people want to keep leaning back on 10 year old process RFCs 
and arguing "well thats just the way we've always done things around here" then 
this organization is going to continue to slow its progress even more - and its descent 
into irrelevancy.  There are a lot of people here (myself included) that want to evolve 
things because they think the IETF still has a lot to offer the industry. But if the 
organization won't evolve, people will take the path of least resistance and go elsewhere 
as they have been doing if you haven't noticed.

        If you want a real example of how this can actually work, watch Anees 
explain how Open Config has done this with just weekly phone calls and a bunch 
of people typing on keyboards. They've done this in less than a year, and have 
rough consensus and (production) running code.  This is how the IETF used to 
operate: people got together, hacked code and got things working.  The goal was 
not having meetings, but producing code with rough consensus.

        https://code.facebook.com/posts/1421954598097990/networking-scale-recap

        --Tom


Yours,
Joel

On 2/26/15 4:21 PM, Thomas D. Nadeau wrote:

On Feb 26, 2015:4:16 PM, at 4:16 PM, Brian E Carpenter 
<brian(_dot_)e(_dot_)carpenter(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:

On 27/02/2015 09:08, Thomas D. Nadeau wrote:

On Feb 26, 2015:2:42 PM, at 2:42 PM, Benson Schliesser 
<bensons(_at_)queuefull(_dot_)net> wrote:

Nico Williams wrote:

Yes, but a record that a concall or other interim meeting took place,
and who attended, even if there are incomplete or missing minutes, is
important for IPR reasons.  Ensuring that such meetings are NOTE WELL
meetings is (should be) a priority, and that includes ensuring that a
record of that much exists.

Ideally the concalls and other interims would be recorded.


I agree completely. My point was that meeting records (including minutes) will 
inevitably be incomplete, or possibly inaccurate, and that relying on the 
mailing list as an authoritative record is more effective.

Of course it is disappointing that we can't meaningfully translate voice 
discussions into text, in the minutes or in mailing list threads. If there were 
some magic tool e.g. that took better minutes then I'd be happy to use it. But 
otherwise, I think we just have to trust chairs to manage WG collaboration in 
whatever way is most effective for their WG's collaborators.


        The first step is to agree that an A/V recording is record enough.


It absolutely is not enough. Please see my previous message,
and the relevant rules in RFC 2418.

   Brian


        You are missing my point. RFC or not, the IETF needs to evolve.

        --Tom

Perhaps having meetbot/txt notes that at a min include actions/decisions like 
we do in the issue tracker we've used for NETMOD's Yang 1.1's issues.

        --Tom

This will inevitably be suboptimal for some part of the population. (For 
instance, I've never been able to find an interim meeting time that fits the 
schedules of all attendees.) But if they (we) always revert to the mailing list 
for decision making then I suspect our work can remain open and transparent.

Cheers,
-Benson