Interim conference calls shouldn't take the place of conversations on the mailing list, but that is obvious.
I agree about the issues around time-zones and scheduling. However, high bandwidth conversations
frequently happen better in voice as does presenting and clarifying questions or concerns.
On the one hand, it would be good in many cases if the IETF standardization process could go faster.
On the other, that does leave some people needing to contribute only sometimes.
I would strongly urge pushing conversations on the list more. One of the advantages of the interim
conference calls is that those who have attended tend to have the current state swapped in and be
able to reply more rapidly - at least in theory.
Regards,
Alia
On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 10:05 AM, Joel M. Halpern <jmh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I need to agree with John here. There are several WGs I try to monitor that started having frequent interim conference calls. There is no way I can reliably make time for that. The advantage of email is that I can fit it in around the work I need to do (including reading it during corporate conference calls.) In one case I have had to dramatically reduce my effective participation in the WG because most of the work moved to the conference calls.
One of the other standards bodies I have had to work with did all of its work in weekly conference calls. This made it next to impossible for me to contribute to most of the topics, as I could not make most of the calls.
Yours,
Joel
On 2/26/15 9:53 AM, Ted Lemon wrote:
On Feb 26, 2015, at 9:37 AM, John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote:
The more we shift
from doing almost all of our work on mailing lists to doing a
significant proportion of it in high-frequency interim meetings,
the more we tend to narrow effective participation to
vendor-supported people with dedicated time in convenient (for
the WG majority) time zones and reduce some of the diversity we
have claimed is important.
Actually, my experience is the opposite: mailing lists are incredibly time consuming, because there are a few participants who feel the need to repeat themselves over and over again in any given discussion, and people aren't concise in their responses, nor considerate of the burden their responses will impose on readers, so there is a lot of reading, much of which is completely redundant. Being restricted to the low shared bandwidth of voice in an online meeting substantially mitigates that, if the working group chair is doing a good job of disciplining the discussion.
There is a reason why we do f2f meetings, and it's not because we like the cookies (although we do).