Just observing that the other name for "virtual interim" is
"teleconference".
We've had pushback in the past about depending on teleconferences for
doing business - in particular people have cited the tendency of other
standards orgs to use regular teleconferences for making decisions and
thereby effectively shutting out everyone who can't be on the calls from
participating; we've cited our extensive use of email as a feature of
our process.
I do think that teleconferences have their place, as do face-to-face
interims.
Encouraging groups to meet at interims *instead* of IETF week? I am very
hesitant to do that.
Whatever the secret sauce of the IETF is (and no matter how tasty it is
after all these years), the IETF meetings are part of it.
On 08/18/2015 10:27 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
I don't think we should encourage or discourage interims. I think we should
just make it clear that they are part of a WG's toolkit to use as appropriate.
For a new topic with a lot of issues to discuss, a two-day f2f interim can
make as much progress as a year of "normal" IETF discussion. For an ongoing
topic, a two-hour virtual interim can be enormously useful, but cuts out
people in some time zones.
I agree that nobody should fly to an IETF week for a two-hour meeting.
In my experience I fly there for about 50 hours of meetings; that's the
point.
Brian