Hi all,
Unsurprisingly, there has been a lot of discussion in
the community recently about planning for IETF meetings
in times of crisis and disruption. Below is a draft of a
charter for a working group, Stay Home Meet Online
(SHMO), that could start to develop long-term guidance
of the sort it would have been nice to have as the IESG,
IRTF Chair, and IETF LLC have been faced with decisions
about canceling the in-person meetings for IETF 107 and
108. It is somewhat in the MTGVENUE mold, as the idea is
to provide high-level guidance about meeting-related
matters. Suresh Krishnan and Russ Housley and I have
been working on this together.
The charter is scoped narrowly to only deal with
cancellation of previously planned in-person meetings.
There are other related topics that need community
guidance — the nomcom eligibility criteria that is
already being worked on (see
elgibility-discuss@xxxxxxxx),
the overall meeting cadence and mix of in-person
versus virtual meetings in the future, how to craft
the meeting experience at an in-person meeting when
significantly more people are remote, etc. But just
the cancellation topics on their own will require a
bunch of work and may attract different participants
than those interested in other topics, so the boundary
is drawn there.
We’re sharing this here on
manycouches@xxxxxxxx to
start community discussion about it with the hope of
either proposing a BOF or perhaps going directly to
chartering if there seems to be support in the
community for that.
We have also published an individual I-D <
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-cooper-shmo-questions-00>
that lists out the questions and considerations the
IESG has been facing when cancelling an in-person
meeting, just to serve as a basis for discussion and
give the community an idea of the kinds of questions
where it would be helpful to have guidance.
Thanks,
Alissa, Suresh, and Russ
—
Stay Home Meet Online (SHMO) Working Group
Draft Charter
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the IETF's typical
schedule of three in-person meetings per year. It has
caused the IETF to have to convert previously
scheduled in-person meetings into fully online
meetings. Although it is the first time the IETF's
meeting schedule has been disrupted, it is possible
that other crises could cause similar disruptions in
the future.
The meeting planning activities that the IESG and the
IETF LLC engage in would benefit from IETF community
consensus guidance concerning novel aspects raised by
these developments. The SHMO working group is
therefore chartered to provide high-level guidance to
the IESG and the IETF LLC concerning the following:
- Criteria for determining when a previously scheduled
in-person meeting should be canceled and replaced with
a fully online meeting. Similar to how RFC 8718
establishes community guidance for the selection of
meeting venues, the IESG and the LLC would benefit
from community consensus guidelines about which
factors to consider when deciding to cancel or replace
an in-person meeting and the relative importance of
those factors. This work item is expected to be
fulfilled with the publication of a BCP.
- Meeting planning in the event that a previously
scheduled in-person meeting needs to be canceled and
replaced with a fully online meeting. Similar to how
RFC 8719 establishes guidance for the regional
rotation of in-person meetings, the IESG and the LLC
would benefit from having community consensus
guidelines about the time zone selection, meeting
length in days, and other high-level scheduling
aspects when an in-person meeting must be cancelled.
This work item is expected to be fulfilled with the
publication of one or more BCPs.
- Technology functionality requirements for the
technologies the IETF uses to support fully online
meetings. This work item is expected to be fulfilled
with one or more informational RFCs.
The work of SHMO is expected to produce high-level
principles, not detailed operational plans.
Specifications of details concerning cancellation
criteria, meeting technologies, and online meeting
agenda formats and content are out of scope.
Discussion of financial aspects of IETF meetings is
out of scope. The goal is to produce guidelines for
the IESG and the IETF LLC to operationalize while
ensuring they have substantial flexibility to continue
to deliver and evolve the IETF meeting experience to
best serve IETF participants and the Internet
community at large.
The disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic may
have been mitigated by the time this group completes
its work, but the experience of handling meeting
planning during the pandemic has proven that having
community consensus guidance at hand when dealing with
novel conditions in the future would be beneficial.
