On 7/17/06 10:11 AM, "Jeffrey Altman" <jaltman@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Speaking as a working group chair, what is important to me is the > ability to make progress on the milestones the working group is > committed to achieve. Sure, but you don't want to risk insularity, which I think clearly has been at least partly responsible for some less-than- stellar work. There's a need to look a little beyond the next deliverable and think about what's needed to avoid turning working groups into echo chambers. Clearly this is more important in the early stages of a working group, but there are always working groups in their early stages. And while there's an idealized picture of how work gets done in the IETF, the truth is that as the organization has grown and has gotten broader participation, culture from other standards bodies has been gradually been incorporated to the point where you cannot honestly say that the main work of the IETF is done on mailing lists. The role of meetings has changed. It seems to me that either we should make a better effort to stick to the ideal or try to be more explicit about the changing role of meetings. That said, and given the difficulties of balancing competing priorities in site location, it seems reasonable to me to make a decent, good-faith effort without getting overly bogged down in "where should we meet?" discussions, and really try to get the remote participation thing nailed down a little better. The ratio of good to bad remote meeting input has improved a lot over the past year or so but there are still too many working groups without a Jabber scribe in the room (which prevents remote listeners from providing inputs), etc. Melinda _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf