On 9/30/21 7:02 PM, John C Klensin wrote:
Keith, noting Brian's comment about 2026 and adding to it that
making any important decision in a meeting of any sort rather
than on a mailing list violates other (IMO, even more important)
rules, my suggestion was based on an assumption that I'm
wondering if you share. That assumption was that, if someone
was not following a WG to the extent of its being on its mailing
list, the odds of their seeing a schedule announcement for an
interim meeting of a particular WG and thereby deciding to
participate in that meeting are pretty low. Not zero -- I've
done it myself as part of tracking a WG I'm concerned about but
don't have time to follow in-depth -- but rather low.
I concur, at least to this point.
And,
again, if we are really going to try to tune things by creating
lots of different mailing lists, that "want to keep an eye on
but not follow" behavior is an argument for announce-WG lists,
not for keeping all of those announcements for all WGs on the
main IETF-announce one.
Perhaps, though I don't want to bikeshed too much about mailing list
organization here.
The general picture that I'm seeing is that different people have
different email reading habits, different ways of organizing email, etc.
so that one size does not fit all. I am therefore leaning toward a
model of "let's make the data available in some well-documented easily
parsed/filtered format say some combination of JSON, email headers, and
plain text, and let participants use existing tools and/or build their
own tools to maintain awareness of what they want to be aware of."
Sure, pick some format that most people can deal with using popular mail
readers or webmail clients. As long as the metadata is in some
well-defined parseable format, the power users can probably get what
they want anyway, and share their tools with others who want to try them.
I think the principle that interim meetings
are subject to the same rules for approval and announcement as
other meetings, is the right principle.
Again, see Brian's comments. However, the other principle, from
long before the pandemic, was to try to minimize interim
meetings in favor of encouraging working on mailing lists. That
principle was established, IMO, because thoughtful emails
--rather than quick notes trying to simulate instant messages of
various sorts -- permitted and encouraged broader participation,
precisely because it made the discussions asynchronous and
immune from excluding people based on location.
(applause)
I find conference calls (whether or not accompanied by video) to be
vastly over-rated in terms of value returned per time/energy
invested. So in my mind there's no substitute for email, and IMO
"interim" meetings should be used sparingly or in emergencies. I
realize that video calls are all the fashion these days, but they are
maddeningly frustrating for discussions for lots of reasons that are
technically very difficult to fix.
But therein lies, I think, the real issue. If the new reality
is that we are rarely going to meet in person with a large
fraction of the most active and influential participants
present, it seems to me that we should be looking carefully at
all aspects of how we do things, not just trying to patch around
issues one at a time
+1.
Keith
