Hi, fully online meetings have a shorter length of day, which complicates scheduling sessions to minimize conflicts, compared to an in-person meeting with longer meeting days. The lack of travel arrangements also reduces the pressure to hold all events in a single week. However, scheduling all events in a single week both reduces the impact on attendees' schedules and encourages cross-review of ideas. Past survey data suggest both broad satisfaction with the current format and concern about the number of scheduling conflicts. The plenary offers a unique opportunity to maximize benefits and minimize costs. This single event consumes an entire 2-3 hour slot of the meeting week across all tracks. Moving the plenary outside the meeting week thus opens up eight long slots that can be used to schedule other meetings. The experiment will test the hypothesis that the plenary is compelling enough to draw attendees independently of the rest of the meeting. *** Proposal For IETF 112, the plenary will occur on the Wednesday before the meeting week (3 November 2021), in the time slot of 13:30-15:00 UTC, or 14:30-16:00 Madrid time. At notable extremes, this begins at 05:30 in San Francisco and ends at 02:00 in Sydney, with some of the less popular hours over the Pacific. *** Feedback The IESG invites feedback to the IESG mailing list (iesg@xxxxxxxx), especially if this proposal would change your ability to attend the plenary. Such feedback would be most useful if received within two weeks of the date of this email, as the IESG will then finalize the decision whether to proceed with the experiment. Strong feedback indicating the experiment would reduce the community’s ability to attend the plenary might cause its cancellation. *** Success Criteria The IESG will evaluate the success of this experiment based on the following criteria after its conclusion, in consultation with the community. * An improvement in survey responses reporting session conflicts compared to previous IETF online meetings * Positive response to a new survey question about subjective satisfaction with the format change * Elimination of a ninth track, and a reduction in formal conflicts in the final agenda compared to previous online meetings * Little or no reduction in plenary attendance (< 15%) compared to other online plenaries in European time zones (i.e., IETF 108 and 110) * The subjective experience of the IESG and Secretariat in attempting to minimize conflicts during IETF 112 This does not imply that all of these metrics must show improvement for the experiment to be considered a success, or that regression in any of them would indicate failure. The relative weights of these considerations are a subject for IESG discussion and community consultation. Lars Eggert IETF Chair, on behalf of the IESG
