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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