On Mon, Sep 20, 2021 at 01:20:35PM -0400, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: > 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. What's more, there have been a lot of new tools that have been developed in the wake of the pandemic, and it's made remote meetings much more efficient. Many of these tools combine video conferencing tools, group chat, and shared documents that can be collaboratively edited. Whether you use proprietary tools (e.g., Zoom, Google Meet/Google Drive), or completely open source tools --- the Linux Plumbers Conference has integrated a number of open source projects including Big Blue Button (BBB), Matrix, Indico, OpenLDAP, etc., into a fully integrated solution which has been used by other Linux kernel communities for collaborating with other. (And other open source conferences have been also using these components, in various configurations and combinations, and over the past two years, they've been getting more powerful and easier to use.) These sorts of tools are *far* more effective than just using mailing lists, and while they don't completely replace face-to-face meetings, the advantage of these remote collaboration tools is that you *can* have at intervals of every few weeks, when that wouldn't be practical if people had to be travelling at that frequency, even in a post-pandemic world. Perhaps if the tools team or some other group were willing to set up the infrastructure, working groups could try it and see what they think. The advantage of having centrally managed infrastructure is that the tools team can make sure all of the materials from the meeting (a video of the video chat, the text chat, the shared doc, the attendence list) can be archived in a central place, which is important in a standards context, from the perspective of transparency, questions over IPR disclosures, etc. If enough working groups find these sorts of collaboration tools to be useful, then maybe the face-to-face meetings can become more effective by being able to be focused on cross-working group and cross-area interaction. Cheers, - Ted P.S. For folks who are interested in learning more about the infrastructed used at the Linux Plumbers Conference, here are some public docs: LPC 2021 Moderator Guide: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VvJzV5OL3-JgaMXdXvYaCL6oOgJaj7csa0Lz-1IF8PE/edit# LPC 2021 Presenter's Guide: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jOZR9V1TMf8pwu1VipcmFBI65Wc5P2_0DUSj2-4QOlA/edit LPC 2020 Session Leads training: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-ljrdVBHSs (Note that having good documentation and training materials is at least as important as integrating the tools that you use!)
