On Aug 19, 2015:4:50 AM, at 4:50 AM, Leif Johansson <leifj(_at_)mnt(_dot_)se>
wrote:
On 2015-08-18 19:15, Phillip Hallam-Baker 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.
Planing interims (esp. finding a time and place that folks can get
travel approval for) is usually a horrible exercise though…
I think that is missing the point; the idea is to have
virtual interim meetings (teleconferences with video i.e.: webex).
While in-person meetings can be effective, in my experience
repeated virtual meetings seem to achieve the same result without
all of the headaches associated with planning/managing a physical meeting
that people need to travel to. The travel issues people raised
earlier (visas, cost, ability to herd all the cats to one place for
a few days, etc…) still exist for any physical meeting and in some ways
are worse because people carve out space for the main IETF meeting while
most have packed schedules normally that are difficult to adjust for
an interim physical meeting plus the travel on either side. Virtual ones
enjoy the fact that while still having some of these challenges, most
of the others are eliminated. And the benefit is that you can easily
schedule many of these - even daily - without incurring any travel cost
penalties. So if it takes 2 or 3 virtual meetings to accomplish what you
might do in one physical one, but you didn’t spend a dime on traveling
cost or time, this is a win.
I will also point out that its also sometimes useful to fragment
meetings into smaller working teams (i.e.: design/sub teams), and
scheduling weekly/periodic meetings for those subsets to iterate on their
specific work items is an effective option. In NETMOD this has been successful
in moving a number of specific work items forward rapidly without the burden
of scheduling a full WG interim meeting, its associated management overhead.
—Tom