--On Thursday, 17 July, 2008 18:19 -0400 Tony Hansen <tony@xxxxxxx> wrote: > It would be be best if the Fri afternoon slot were filled in > early rather than as the last slots to be filled in. That way > people would have more notice that they're being included in > the experiment and there'd be less of a chance of a rude > surprise. Russ, I agree with Tony. It is perhaps worth mentioning that we've tried versions of this before (and done so without clear evaluation criteria -- Brian is right about that). The mistake in the past was that the scheduling algorithms have sent a clear message that there will be few IETF sessions on Friday and that most of them will be unimportant. There are also two rather different experiments that you could carry out here. I'd favor the second, but you should at least be clear about what you intend. Experiment 1: The Friday afternoon slots are just slots, like any other slots, and the Secretariat tries to distribute WGs across the entire week including those slots. Experiment 2: You treat the Friday slots mostly as an overflow area, using scheduling rules like: * If you ask for three slots (and the relevant signoff process occurs), you are almost guaranteed a Friday slot and might get two or three. * If you ask for two slots, the odds of at least one of them being allocated on Friday are very high. That would make things fairly predictable, and would work from a scheduling standpoint unless several of the "we need multiple slots" WGs have overlapping membership. It would also probably work out without disrupting the various groups that may be meeting on Friday now (an IRTF group has been mentioned and, if I recall, ISOC sometimes uses Friday time) in that missing one session of a two-slot (or more) WG is typically much less bad than missing the single session of a one-slot WG. But the two models are very different and any experiments would find themselves testing different things. One other observation: To the extent that the reason for doing this is, as indicated in your note, "...Several WGs are not able to get as much meeting time as they need to progress their work...", I would encourage the IESG to very carefully evaluate what is actually going on above and beyond whether having more of Friday available would help with scheduling. For example, have these WGs shifted from getting most of their work done on mailing lists to doing almost everything in meetings and, if so, is that a problem that needs fixing? If mailing lists are being used adequately, do the WGs have a task management problem (e.g., trying to work on too many things)? Are they conducting meetings efficiently and using the time well? And so on. Basically, if we believe in our claims that most work gets done on mailing lists, if a WG routinely requires most than one slot and especially if they require more than two, I would wonder more about what isn't working and how to fix it than I would about allocating more meeting time. best, john _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf