On 21/09/2021 03:12, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
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.
Disagree 100%.
An I-D is posted, I comment thereon, most of my comments are accepted, I
wait for the new revision and then check to see how my comments have
been addressed. There is little to discuss and nothing that a
face-to-face, real or virtual meeting would make happen faster.
Most of the in-person meetings I have attended have been a waste of
time. Powerpoint presentations adding nothing for those capable of and
willing to read text.
BOFs are different; there you need a sense of support, of consensus of
divergence and that may be true of the early, strategy setting
discussions but once an I-D is adopted then I think it rare that a
concurrent meeting achieves much. e-mail allows time for thought, for
consideration (even if some do not make use of that capability).
I find that the process is much slower than it was two years ago because
many authors seem to produce one revision per IETF meeting cycle so it
is months before a revision appears by which time I have to dredge back
into my memory about the comments I made or, in practice, keep much more
detailed notes as to what I found and what I suggested. For this and
some other reasons, I get to comment on about half the I-D that I would
have done in the past. Some WG that I track to have virtual meetings
every week or every fortnight and the minutes seem to reflect a lack of
progress on the same topics after each meeting.
Tom Petch
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!)
.
