I am very much in agreement with you.
When issues were needing work in EMAN, I wish I had just setup interim
meetings to progress issues along. That might have sped things up by 2x.
Instead, we tried to herd the cats via email/deadlines, or used the full
meetings at deadlines.
As an existence proof of success, the NETMOD WG has been holding more
or less regular interim meetings to hunt down and solve issues around Yang 1.1
as well as modeling for about the last year. We have made rapid progress in
both of those areas. If we’d waited for the main in-person meetings, we would
not have made such progress for all the obvious reasons you cited below. Both
of the Hawaii and Prague meetings had key people missing for the same reasons
you cite below, resulting in a distinct lack of progress on issues. I suspect
we will have more of that given the far off/expensive/time-consuming nature of
the upcoming meeting venues.
—Tom
On Aug 18, 2015:1:15 PM, at 1:15 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker
<phill(_at_)hallambaker(_dot_)com> wrote:
Historically there has been a pushback on a WG holding an interim meeting
instead of meeting at an IETF main meeting. Yes, cross-WG communication and
all that.
However, looking at my schedule, I really can't see myself justifying what
will be a two week interruption to fly out to Yokohama for a two hour meeting
and more importantly, I don't think many of the folk who I would be looking
to collaborate with at that meeting will either.
Now that IETF main meeting time is becoming an increasingly scarce commodity,
perhaps it is time to re-evaluate the old view that interim meetings should
not be a substitute for having a session at a main meeting and instead start
encouraging that for certain types of work.
Particularly early on in a WG, a two day interim can be a lot more use than a
two hour main meeting event.