On 2/12/15 7:40 PM, Russ Housley wrote: > We disagree. Many people tell us (on the IAOC surveys) that the most > important thing that happens at IETF meetings is the hallway > conversations. It is a significant part of the culture. I think there's a cultural thing at work - it appears to be increasingly the case that IETF culture requires meetings and face-to-face discussion. There are companies that have telecommuting cultures and in which it's possible to have "hallway" discussions online, and ones in which remote work is not part of the culture and if there are people offsite they're remembered as an afterthought, if at all. I've been irritated recently by the extent to which we've moved away from being an organization that makes useful things towards one which publishes requirements documents and problem statements and which sinks a lot of effort into proposals which isn't driven by actual product or deployment needs. I think there's a productivity cost, because we get big pulses of work three times/year and not enough gets done between. The increasing valuation of meetings doesn't really do much to discourage that. (My real beef is with being underresourced and oversludged and the amount of time it takes to complete work as a result; if we had plenty of bandwidth and tons of work was being done between meetings, less-than-useful work wouldn't be a problem). Melinda