The IAB has heard from the community a desire for more openness in our
workshops, including remote access. After a good amount of discussion, we
continue to believe that for IAB workshops, there are sometimes good reasons
not to default to the IETF's usual stance of full realtime remote access for
anyone that wants to participate. Our practice will continue to be to allow
the Program Committee (PC) for a given workshop to decide how best to include
the community in order to accomplish the technical goals of a given workshop.
We are updating our internal documentation on how to run a workshop with
tradeoffs for the PC to consider, particularly around how open to make the
discussion. Here are some of those considerations, for community comment:
Keeping in mind that an IAB workshop is often held at the very beginning of our
community's discussion of a given topic, it is sometimes important for the
discussion to be as unencumbered as possible by Audio/Visual overhead (Stand
There! Speak into the mic! Say your name!) in order to get to the heart of an
architectural discussion in the short time we have for the workshop. Allowing
full remote participation (Jabber relay! Mute your line!) would cause even more
impact to the in-room discussion, with today's typical technology.
For some workshops, at least a portion of the discussion is held using the
Chatham House Rule (https://www.chathamhouse.org/about/chatham-house-rule), in
an attempt to elicit input that participants would not be able to offer in a
session where all input is attributed. In those cases, remote participants
would need to accept the Rule explicitly, or be dropped for that portion of the
conversation. With remote participants, Chatham House Rule contributions can
be more difficult to elicit because it is more difficult to build the personal
trust required. The use of the Chatham House Rule *has* been useful in several
previous workshops.
For many workshops, a voice or video recording is made to assist in later
preparation of notes. Recording devices are stopped during any portion of the
discussion the happens under the Chatham House Rule, in order to help shield
the anonymity of the participants in those discussions.
For some workshops, individual invited remote contributors might be
accommodated. This approach can avoid *some* of the previous issues by
training the remote participant ahead of the meeting (check hardware, ensure
they are always on mute unless speaking, etc), and ensuring that the remote
participant has explicitly agreed to whatever operating rules are chosen by
that workshop. Such invitations are at the discretion of the PC, and will be
balanced between the usefulness of the remote contribution and the
cost/complexity/discussion overhead created.
For all workshops, the PC will strive to make raw minutes available as quickly
as possible after the workshop. For several of the of the recent workshops,
transcripts have been available within a week or so. The IAB-stream RFC with
the full workshop report of course takes longer to prepare, analyze, and
approve.
The PC will therefore need to decide the value of getting the larger community
information in near real time vs waiting a week or so for transcripts. If they
decide more remote participation is desired, they will have to budget
appropriately for equipment, web meeting services, technicians, etc.
In the case of the MaRNEW workshop, the PC decided that we wanted a robust
in-person discussion with a portion being under the Chatham House Rule. We
further committed to getting minutes published as quickly as possible (here:
https://github.com/MaRNEW/Minutes). As such, we decided that remote
participation was not a priority for this workshop.
In the case of the IOTSI workshop, the purpose was to get participants from
many SDOs and organizations with different IPR rules. (Indeed, as discussed at
the IETF 92 tech plenary, the IoT semantic interoperability problem is largely
outside the scope of the IETF.) As such, the PC decided that the IETF Note
Well would be inappropriate, and that it would be up to the participants
whether Chatham House rules would apply. Therefore, the PC decided that remote
participation was not a priority for this workshop.
If you would like to discuss this further in public, please use
architecture-discuss(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org (subscribe at
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/architecture-discuss). Confidential
notes can be sent to the IAB at iab(_at_)iab(_dot_)org.
--
Joe Hildebrand
On behalf of the IAB