--On Wednesday, December 30, 2020 11:30 +0100 Vittorio Bertola
<vittorio.bertola=40open-xchange.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Il 30/12/2020 09:08 Stewart Bryant <stewart.bryant@xxxxxxxxx>
>> ha scritto:
>>
>> Given that attending F2F would require a week of OOO, ie
>> with IETF getting priority and day job often postponed, why
>> does the fact that it is virtual mean that IETF becomes
>> secondary?
>
> It is just human culture. Being physically present in a time
> and place implies availability for others in the same time and
> place. Not doing so is by default an act of social aggression,
> which needs explanations and apologies. On the other hand, not
> being available for activities in a different time and place
> is considered normal.
>
> It is not impossible to explain everyone that even if you are
> physically there you need to be unavailable for a commitment
> elsewhere, but that is not what people will naturally think
> and be convinced of, especially people that expect to be given
> top priority by you (boss, spouse, children). So, as a
> minimum, you need to compromise between the remote meeting and
> your duties of attention to people that are physically near
> you.
Without disagreeing with Vittorio, there is also the fact that,
for some (from comments in this and other threads, many) of us,
being physically away from homes and offices fro several days or
a week makes it possible to concentrate on a meeting, while
being in more "normal" places often does not. When IETF
meetings are local (within commuting distance), some of us have
even discovered that moving into one of the meeting hotels for a
week helps one concentrate on he meeting. Some of this sounds
trivial, but adds up: If one is in normal places of residence
and work, the phone rings and one answers it. If away, it goes
to voicemail, voicemail that might even be set up with "I'm away
for the week, don't expect responses until I get back".
But those are the compromises Vittorio talks about. And, almost
inevitably for some, the meeting is going to lose sometimes.
For me, if the times are bad enough, I'm going to attend only
sessions that I think are critical. For others, it may involve
writing off the meeting. Still others will manage to get to all
sessions and be alert, either because the times are better and
they can push local interruptions away or because they can just
shut everything else off for the week as effectively as they
would if they were at the meeting site.
As I said in my earlier note, no amount of discussion in a WG
can change any of that, putting us in a position of discussing
who will be excluded and on what criteria or, in the cases of
suggestions about repeating each session in a different time
zone, how we integrate separate meetings and discussions.
Do I have a solution? Yeah, but even though the IETF as
successfully used it in the past, cultures change and it seems
to be interesting to fewer and fewer people, so it doesn't
count.
john
