[I hope to raise this issue during the administrative plenary.
Because I obviously won't have time at the microphone to present the
full argument and because I might not get the chance at all, I'm
writing something down and sending it out now.]
When you participated in a WG on any Friday during the past meetings,
you probably noticed impaired attendance. This becomes particularly
visible for WG chairs, few of whom are thrilled to get a slot on Friday.
Friday is declared to be a real day, but the declaration is
disregarded (rationally, as I'll explain) by a fraction of
participants. This makes Friday a defective day, making it rational
for more people not to attend, creating a positive feedback loop
making it more defective.
The fuzzy end bug wasn't always there. When the IETF didn't have
sessions on Friday, the technical plenary was the last thing that
happened during each meeting for normal participants [1]. The
plenaries have the largest attendance, so it put a very sharp stop to
the IETF meeting. When Friday sessions were added, there were few to
begin with, so the end got fuzzy and the attendance problems began.
For some participants, it is rational to skip Friday in its present
form. Checking this meeting's agenda, Monday currently has 124 track-
hours [2] worth of sessions. (Tuesday-Thursday are similar full-day
affairs for most people, even if differently structured because of the
social and the plenaries.) Friday currently has 29.5 track-hours
worth of sessions, ~4.2 times less. For a person who is only
interested in a few sessions, there's a good chance that none of them
will fall on Friday. If the person judges that the relatively small
probability of missing an interesting session (or, more precisely, the
relatively small expected number of interesting sessions) that fall(s)
on Friday, multiplied by the cost of missing a session, is smaller
than the cost of an extra day of travel, it is rational for them not
to attend Friday. Repeating that Friday is a normal day is not going
to change the calculation if Friday continues to be ~4.2 less valuable.
Once these participants choose to go home on Friday, the value of
Friday is further depleted. Not only there are fewer sessions on
Friday, but they are not as well attended, creating a multiplier
through a positive feedback loop.
The bug is easy to fix: we should restore the technical plenary to
where it was before -- namely, to the very end of the IETF meeting for
normal participants.
Put the technical plenary on Friday afternoon. This will make it
natural to increase the number of track-sessions on Friday. This will
restore a sharp end to the IETF, fixing the Friday bug.
A side effect of the fix is that it would increase the total number of
available track-hours by about 15%, making scheduling easier for the
next few meetings after implementation.
Here are some immediate, but invalid, objections that this proposal is
prone to elicit:
"But nobody will come to the technical plenary Friday afternoon!" --
1. We did come to the technical plenary when it was the last thing on
Thursday, and it was in the evening.
2. If people won't come to the technical plenary, they won't come to
WG meetings. If it's an unsuitable meeting time, we should not put
WGs there.
"Can't we just make sure it's not the same groups that get put on
Friday?" --
Zero-sum redistribution of pain pitting WGs against one another does
not reduce total pain. We can fix the bug instead of making everyone
suffer equally.
"Can't we only put unimportant sessions, like second sessions and
maybe these two session I personally don't like, on Friday?" --
No. Friday started out with only non-technical sessions. The first
was IPR, if I recall. The IETF needed more first-class technical
track-hours, which is why they bled into Friday. We have no plan to
reduce the number of sessions. Moving technical plenary to Friday
afternoon would, instead of reducing the number of first-class hours,
increase it, moving Friday closer to a full day.
"Can't people just book tickets after the agenda comes out?" --
This is not the answer for two reasons:
1. Agenda changes.
2. This replaces "expected number of interesting sessions that fall on
Friday" with "number of interesting sessions that fall on Friday".
Because the expected number was lower, the actual number will be lower
on average, giving a similar aggregate effect.
We shouldn't suffer from the Friday bug and repeat "normal day"
mantra. We should fix the bug that detached the technical plenary
from the end of the IETF meeting by moving it to the end again.
-- Stas
PS The WG that I cochair happened to get the short straw this meeting
with several key contributors unable to attend, which triggered my
thinking about how to fix the Friday bug, but this message is not
about any particular WGs. Again, we should not redistribute the pain
or worry if it gets distributed evenly when we can simply remove it.
[1] "Normal participants" = {all participants} - {people who come for
a single meeting or two} - {members of IESG, IAB, etc.}
[2] track-hours = sum_slots num_sessions*duration. This is an
imperfect proxy for person-hours, because it does not take into
account number of attendees of the sessions. (I don't have data on
person-hours by day of the week.) To partially mitigate, I avoided
picking Tuesday-Thursday with the huge social event and the plenaries
as baseline.
--
Stanislav Shalunov
BitTorrent Inc
shalunov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
personal: http://shlang.com
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