On Mon, Sep 20, 2021 at 10:04 AM John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Agree with Phillip, but I would add one more thing. Stewart's
note includes "country that is open to International
participation in technical standards meetings". I'd would be
happy --or at least amused-- to see a counterexample, but,
AFAICT, the number of countries who have imposed travel
restrictions -- regardless of when, for how long, and with
various details-- but have said "except for technical standards
meetings, whose attendees are exempt from the rules" is zero.
Maybe
predictability will improve to the point that we get months of
notice about who is going to impose (or drop) which restrictions
and when rather than the "little or no notice" Phillip mentions,
but the odds of getting enough notice to plan meetings well are
about zero.
Agree on the second. On the first, I have been in regular contact with people who have been watching the data moving through the data funnel from observation to government(s) taking action. This is not a reliable guide to knowing if we will be locked down in another n weeks. Most of the reports do not go anywhere.But this is the same information that after filtering, checking, etc is leading to governments taking action. From Delta being reported as being potentially significantly different and dangerous to massive numbers of cases being reported was maybe three weeks. Once it was clear that the situation was serious, lockdowns started being declared in days.
Rather than predictability improving, I expect the opposite because I don't expect the shadow intelligence operation that is providing this information to continue at its present intensity indefinitely.
At this point I do not expect this to change in 2022 and it is unlikely to be significantly different in 2023.
Net result: Unless we really want to have never ending
discussions about how one country or company is more protective,
infected, or reasonable than another (and likely to remain so
some months or years off) or about which groups of participants
are more important than others, it seems to me that there are
only three realistic questions:
I agree on John's options but I would add a fourth which is to refactor the way IETF WGs operate and move to the model that W3C and OASIS operate under in which the WGs have regular (usually biweekly in my groups) telecons and that is where the majority of the work takes place. The organization meets in plenary session only once a year and that entire meeting is all about cross-area communication.
The current model wasn't really working before the pandemic. The WG meetings were too short to be useful to progress the spec and too short to provide any real information to people outside the group. In my experience, the mere fact that all the areas meet in the same location does very little for encouraging cross-area collaboration because everyone is focused on their own stuff during an IETF week.
Further, when we restart, we are going to risk having a series of under attended meetings as many people will not attend fearing that the meeting will not have critical mass. Why not wait four months to the next one? If there is only one meeting a year, attendance is going to be a lot higher.
