Lakshminath, On Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 02:35:21PM -0700, Lakshminath Dondeti wrote: > > I am curious about the scheduling issues. If the IESG job is a "full-time" > job, why can't the people on IESG find time to meet with each other, f2f or > in telecons; perhaps someone will help me understand that. The other issue > that comes up is time zones. We've had this in the Nomcom and I found out > recently that telecons at odd hours is the norm if you work in some > SDOs. I think these should be non-issues really. > > Perhaps the IESG job description should say in part, "you are expected to > work some 35-40 hours a week on IESG stuff, should keep your calendar open > in the months of ... for a retreat, and should be able to participate in > telecons at odd hours." If you remove IESG from that sentence, it probably > is already in many IETFers' job descriptions. I think you have a reasonable understanding of the amount of time involved and issues with time zones. I think we should step away a bit from the word full time for the IESG job. We recently discussed this in the IESG and it was felt my most of us that a time commitment of at least 30 hours per week is needed, while many ADs spend more than that. Whether people than find even more time to do additional work is not really our problem as long it doesn't affect IESG performance. Many of our scheduling problems are related to timezones as you already guessed: in practice we have a 8am-11am window (Pacific Time Zone) that we can use for calls in the morning (from my perspective and assuming that I am not traveling ;-)). Other issues are our different expertises: eg. I am the OPS AD and feel that it is quite important to show up at various fora where operational people show up like NANOG, Apricot and RIPE. I bet that the Security Area Directors have their own security conferences etc. that they feel that are important to attend. In addition, despite the fact that many of us spend most of our time on the AD job, many of us occasionally have a need to show up at our company headquarters. Other issues include things like if you need to schedule something with X people also X people need to respond and progress on finding a common time is only as fast as the last person who reacts. And the larger the group, the more likely this last person is quite late due to various reasons from vacations, illness or to just being extra busy during business travel. Basically, trying to coordinate times that we can all be available is often already challenging and results in scheduling meetings further in the future than we would like to. Note that is just one of the issues, there are many issues that occur in the dynamics of a large group, whether is scheduling or simple things like finding a problem on a conference call bridge where one line causes a lot of noise which clearly takes a lot more time to debug when the group is larger. And all these issues together are decreasing our overall efficiency up to a point where things get extremely hard to get any work done (see Harald's mail for a nice explanation). David Kessens --- _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf