Brian E Carpenter wrote:
I was talking to a couple of people this week about what I consider to
be a related issue: the fact that for the two or three wg meetings I'm
interested in, there's little point in me being at the meeting for a
whole week.
What about holding two or three meetings smaller meetings a year for
each area, and then just one big meeting for the full IETF? That
would bring down the cost of the individual area meetings and
therefore the admission fee, make them smaller and therefore capable
of fitting into a wider range of hotels, and would likely result in
fewer nights of hotel stay for a lot of people.
The financial fallacy in that is failing to note that about half the
meeting fee isn't used to fund meeting expenses, but to fund continuing
operations of the IETF as a whole (secretariat, RFC Editor, etc.) So
restructuring the meetings would have to be done in a way that preserves
the meetings surplus at about the same annual total as today.
I like the idea of trying a different meeting structure instead of,
or in addition to, the '2 hour status meeting' structure we have now.
It has nothing to do with money, but rather getting work done,
by applying the right resources in the right place at the right time.
I know all about the cross-participation/review argument.
IMO, the ability for a few WGs (or entire area, whatever) to cancel all
WG meetings for the area for an entire day and conduct some
sort of on-site workshop or design meeting, would actually
enforce cross participation. It might actually resemble
the Real Engineering practices some of us go through in our 'day jobs'.
It should be up to the ADs and the Chairs, and depend on the
situation at hand, as to how many hours or even days worth
of IETF WG meetings they would preempt for such a meeting.
Also, personally, I think that once a year wouldn't be enough to keep
the cross-checking between the areas at a sufficient level. And personally,
even if I'm only active in two or three WGs, the chance to sample what's
going in related and even in unrelated WGs, as well as research groups
and BOFs, makes it well worth staying all week.
Brian
Andy
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