Re: Fix the Friday attendance bug: make the technical plenary the last IETF session, like it was before

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This would recognize that Friday is not a "normal day" and so would be an improvement.

First, I appreciate you stepping forward. This would redistribute ~5% of the existing Friday pain to RRG. Regardless of other outcomes of this discussion, RRG should always from now on be scheduled on Friday as long as we have a Friday.

Second, do we have ~19 more WGs that would trade off having the Friday pain for having a consistent meeting day on Friday?

--
Stanislav Shalunov
BitTorrent Inc
shalunov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

personal: http://shlang.com

On Nov 11, 2009, at 4:04 AM, Marshall Eubanks wrote:

Dear Stanislav;

RRG always had good attendance on Friday. It was, I think, viewed by the people interested
as a session to schedule for.

So, one possible solution would be to see if there were WG or RG that wanted permanent Friday status. That way, people who wanted to attend these sessions would know that they had to be there on Friday.

This implies that there would be people that would only come for that day, or for the end of the week, but we have some of that already.

Marshall


On Nov 10, 2009, at 3:05 AM, Stanislav Shalunov wrote:

[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.


+1

Marshall

"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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