Re: Ad Hoc BOFs

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Fred,

I have mixed feelings about this. I had a tough week, particularly with lunches and dinner times packed with more meetings than usual. I already complained to Ray that they had made the system too efficient. You could now get lunch sandwich from the cafeteria in five minutes, making it possible to join a meeting during lunch break. Please be sure to include "only slow restaurants" in the meeting selection criteria for future meetings, so that we can have our lunch break back :-) Other problems that I saw during the week with the ad hoc BOFs include people consistently referring to the meetings as "BOFs", without making a distinction between a real BOF and an unofficial side meeting, some ADs worrying about conflicts and lack of scheduling for the ad hoc meetings, and some repetition of same proposals from the previous IETF without apparent progress.

That being said, in this meeting I saw more new things than I have seen for a while. I also felt that while I was busy and tired, I had made the right personal scheduling choices. For the record, I only participated three out of eight possible Internet area related side meetings, due to lack of time/other meetings and in few cases because I felt I needed to give myself some rest.

But we should also think about this a bit more than provide anecdotes. Lets think about the effect of the having side meetings to begin with, make a list of these meetings public, the location, and leadership participation separately. I think we all agree that having such meetings is great. That is how IETF gets the next wave of interesting topics to work on. We absolutely need the ability for hallway conversations, bar meetings, and the like.

I was responsible for making the list of meetings public. For the record I still do have mixed feelings about this. I have heard many people state that we should rather have smaller meetings and that its the public part of these meetings that drives up the participant count and makes the meeting more formal. Maybe so. I will point out, however, that one function of the public listing is to find a similarly interested discussion partner. Some people in the IETF are very well connected and may not need that, but I'm not sure that's true of everyone.

The location. I personally like having food in a small gathering, in a nice environment. That being said, the only real bar BoF that I attended was horrible in terms of being able to hear what the other people said. We had a dozen people, and I could not hear what the other end of the table said, multiple sets of people talked in parallel, etc. In the meetings that happened at the meeting rooms I was always able to understand what others were saying (though maybe not what their idea was :-) In general, I think one of the biggest values of the IETF is that we can put people together. I have no problem asking the secretariat to give one of our unused rooms for some ad hoc meeting if the participants believe it makes them move things forward.

Participation. As you can tell from above, I do not feel capable (or even obliged) of attending all these meetings. I try to make the most important ones, but you are on your own if you organizing an unofficial meeting. Just like you have always been. I know some other ADs have worried about scheduling conflicts with directorates and actual meetings. I'm not sure I want to see these meeting scheduled in any particular manner. If someone wants me to be somewhere, they better make sure I know when it is, why I should be there, and that I have no conflicts at that time. I do think that we should not schedule unofficial meetings against working group meetings. Looking at the bar BOF wiki, it does not seem that this was happening too much.

Jari

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