On 5/26/17 6:43 PM, John C Klensin wrote:
(1) <rant> Suresh's description of these informal meetings match
reasonably closely something we did in the distant past. It was
calls a "BOF". Over the years, that concept of a BOF as a
relatively informal session for discussion of new ideas and
other things that were not ready for WG charters, morphed into
very formal arrangements requiring formal proposals more than
six weeks in advance of IETF meetings and approval by the IESG
and advice from the IAB. People dealt with that problem with
formally organized Bar BOFs, a combination that would have been
considered an oxymoron when BOFs were more informal gatherings,
which led to requests for meeting rooms for side meetings and
now sign-up arrangements for those meeting rooms.</rant>
I agree with all of this, although I think it's very easy to
move from less structure to more structure and extremely difficult
to move from more structure to less structure. This weighty
process stuff was put in place to solve some problem, and I
think (but am not completely sure) that that problem is related
to resource contention and shortages, where "resource" is probably
some combination of time/attention of the I*, meeting rooms,
etc. But, of course, the problem of how to have relatively
unstructured but productive interactions hasn't gone away, so
we keep adding more, er, "stuff" to the process of finding ways
to talk with each other. And then the culture has changed as
well, with increasing participation from people whose job it
is to go to standards meetings bringing in process expectations
from organizations with more formal structures.
I'll add that it's kind of weird, at least to me, to say
that people will get supported resources to brainstorm together
informally but only if they grab that resource first.
It would be nice to find some way to strip away some of the
weight in our processes. I'm still intrigued by the IRSG
experiment with letting groups meet for a year and seeing what
they come up with, then axing them if the work isn't up to
snuff, although that may not translate well to the broader
IETF organization. In the meantime, over the past few years
I've increasingly found that the best place to grab some
informal chat and whiteboarding time to work through some ideas
at meetings is the hackathon (which is, of course, not its
intent, but there we are anyway).
Melinda
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