(trying to a shift this to admin-discuss, as requested -- although I question the wisdom of that decision for which see separate note -- again while not cutting off the ietf@ discussion until others shift too ) Another remote participant response, building on Kathleen's response in the hope that something useful can be learned from similarities and differences. It may be relevant that she and I are in the same time zone and, indeed, live within several miles/km of each other... --On Saturday, April 1, 2023 07:13 -0400 Kathleen Moriarty <kathleen.moriarty.ietf@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Greetings! > > Earlier in the thread, there was a request to hear from remote > participants. I remained remote for this meeting as the > distance to travel added too much away time in total. I am > planning to be in San Francisco. In my case, the issue was less too much time away but concerns about travel time, costs, some COVID concerns, and, yes, carbon footprint. > In the past, I did stay up all hours to attend meetings. This > was because of a direct responsibility as an AD at the time. > For this meeting, I attended all sessions where I was a chair > or presenting. I had co-chairs in the room or this would not > have been possible. I no longer have any formal leadership responsibilities at the IETF (pain-in-the-neck and voice-from-the-rough don't count) and was not even signed up for any presentations, so, if I were using the logic I deduce from the above, I would have gotten much more sleep this last week. I was not able to switch my personal time onto that in Yokohama, with several commitments during the week in local business hours. With some remote meetings, I've been able to do that switch and the time zone shift has not been much more of a problem than attending in person. Neither arrangement will be true for everyone remote at every meeting so, if the information is useful, we should be concerned about blanket generalizations. I did attend all of the sessions I considered very important, including a few side meetings (on this subject and others) and the plenary, but my threshold for "important" went way up and I did miss one session in which I intended to participate because I was just too tired to do a meeting at 3:30AM local time after ones between midnight and 3AM. I believe that meetings halfway around the world (twelve hours time difference plus or minus a few) are always going to cause different remote experiences and related decision-making than ones only a few time zones away. As an extreme example, IETF 114 (in the same timezone) posed an almost entirely different set of challenges to attend remotely than IETF 116. >... > I'm going to watch the recordings of meetings that happened > in the very late hours and of course something is missed. For most of the sessions I did not attend but consider interesting, I will not watch the recordings. Instead, I persist in the -- official and told to newcomers but probably outdated -- belief that I should be able to get everything I need from the mailing list, minutes, and published I-Ds. When those are insufficient or contain pointers elsewhere, I will typically ask myself how much I really care --about the topic and about WGs that care enough about either the supposed rules or about remote participants-- to spend the time to dig into those other materials. The answer is, more often than not, "no"... and a strong temptation to appeal decisions to appeal decisions to hold Last Calls on the grounds that the behavior of the WG was systematically exclusionary wrt a broad range of participants and perspectives. > I do think we can achieve more remotely, but we need to work > together for that to be possible. Let me say that differently and more strongly. Most paths to significantly less carbon impact (much less "net zero") pass through "more remote", whether that be individuals staying home, reducing the number of in-person meetings, or encouraging organizations -- particularly, IMO, the LLC and ISOC-- to carefully consider how many people they need to have present f2f (and, where appropriate, how to organize things to reduce that number without significantly reducing effectiveness). If "more remote" is going to work, the community and its decision-makers need to get much more serious along many dimensions. They range from a need for ADs to push hard to get minutes out quickly (not let them drag out for a few months); to getting much more serious about people (especially ones who do not have large images on-camera) carefully announcing their names each time they start to speak; and many other things, including recognizing that there now seem to be two types of "side-meetings". Stated extremely, one type involves local, narrow interest, or quasi-social events. The others are meetings that provide information for (or that might lead to) IETF decision making even if the group involved is some sort of task force or LLC effort. The latter either need to be treated as IETF efforts, with adequate attention to the needs of remote participants or they don't need meeting time. Treating them as "side meeting" to avoid cluttering up the main agenda may be fine, but, for that type of session, deciding that "side meeting" means that remote participation need be no better than "best effort" should not be... at least if meaningful remote participation is important. > Michael's suggestion for plenary meetings makes sense. I > also appreciate WGs that meet frequently in between meetings > as that lessens the need for travel too. The only problem with > that (for me) is that I have a standing conflict with one of > them and gave to decide each week what to attend. This may or may not be a net-zero issue but, because all-remote interim meetings inevitably involve the sort of schedule conflicts Kathleen identifies and some would-be participants with day jobs having unreasonable time zone conflicts, I think it would be far better for broadly based, inclusive, IETF specification development if we focused much more on mailing lists, probably with the IESG pushing back on WGs with multiple, even regularly scheduled, interim meetings. That difference probably has zero net effect on carbon impact, but it is helpful, IMO, to keep looking at the whole system. > I do think we can do better. We have to be willing. Indeed. And, if we are not willing, we should probably be asking ourselves hard questions about whether we are inadvertently limiting the diversity of participation and diversity of technical inputs enough to reduce the IETF's overall effectiveness as well as providing disincentives to remote participation and f2f meeting reduction. best, john
