On 24 Nov 2024, at 22:54, IETF Executive Director wrote:
Hi all
Thanks to all of you who responded to our post-meeting survey for IETF 121 Dublin. The results and report are not available as a blog post https://www.ietf.org/blog/ietf-121-post-meeting-survey/ and copied below.
So there were a bunch of questions on the meeting survey about ALLDISPATCH and one with some freeform answers. I will pick on this answer in particular:
"It should be obvious that it is a failed experiment, but given we were told Friday afternoon is a success despite it being an obvious failure with any basic observation, I'm not confident this will be realized."
Well, that seems to me a bit cheeky! It certainly isn't obvious to me, and the overall results of the survey were 55% to make it permanent, 35% to ditch it, and 10% "other", which says to me that it wasn't obvious to a bunch (indeed, the majority) of the rest of us. But clearly more than a third of us don't like it. So whether from the person who posted the above or some others, I'd really like to hear why.
I want to keep it because:
- it prevents forum shopping
- it makes an obvious path for new work coming in
- it makes for good cross-area review
- it de-conflicts dispatch from other WGs, which is great for new work because I would like to check out new work all the time and not just when I have the session free.
The substantive comments in the survey were not convincing to me:
"Topics at AllDispatch are too diverse, most people only care for a very small subset. It is a lot of waste of time waiting."
"It's not worth making the entire IETF stop for alldispatch. Area-specific dispatch meetings are more granular, allow the rest of the community to be more productive."
"It helps the ADs, but is worse for the rest of us."
These three and others like them are a total bummer to me. This is a volunteer organization. Cross-area review of proposals is not only useful, it is essential that we all do it and not leave it to the ADs. The above comments say to me, "I'm just here to work on my thing and couldn't give a hoot to volunteer to help with other stuff." If you want your work reviewed and approved by the IETF as a whole, get off your butt and help the rest of us! And I know for a fact that my input into everything from applications down to routing has been useful from time to time; it's amazing what a bit of knowledge about one layer really helps to catch something that people in another layer never see. And if you don't want to help out keeping the organization running, go get a cup of coffee; the rest of us want to do good cross-area work. So I find this excuse not convincing at all.
"Not enough time to get into any details, all conclusions just “have a bof”"
All of the proposals came with drafts with plenty of details, so this sounds like someone didn't read the drafts. And only 2 of the 8 on the agenda got "have a bof" as a result, so I don't know what that's about. So again, not too convincing.
"Please do not continue. It is like a big court with all people judging. Really really not the best way to have new people coming to IETF."
Even the area dispatch sessions are like that. And for better or worse, the IETF really cannot do everything brought to us, so we have to have some forum in which to determine what's in and what's out. Using a dispatch session is much better than putting people through a whole BoF only to find out that we're not interested or that they're not ready to move forward. I think having a place to do a quick review and have the more experienced folks among us be able to say, "Not quite ready for primetime yet" or "Go straight to a WG" or anything in between is really valuable.
So I really really really want to keep ALLDISPATCH permanently, and in an unconflicted session. Someone tell me why I'm wrong.
pr
--
Pete Resnick https://www.episteme.net/
All connections to the world are tenuous at best
