I am very much in agreement with you. When issues were needing work in EMAN, I wish I had just setup interim meetings to progress issues along. That might have sped things up by 2x. Instead, we tried to herd the cats via email/deadlines, or used the full meetings at deadlines. As an existence proof of success, the NETMOD WG has been holding more or less regular interim meetings to hunt down and solve issues around Yang 1.1 as well as modeling for about the last year. We have made rapid progress in both of those areas. If we’d waited for the main in-person meetings, we would not have made such progress for all the obvious reasons you cited below. Both of the Hawaii and Prague meetings had key people missing for the same reasons you cite below, resulting in a distinct lack of progress on issues. I suspect we will have more of that given the far off/expensive/time-consuming nature of the upcoming meeting venues. —Tom > On Aug 18, 2015:1:15 PM, at 1:15 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker <phill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Historically there has been a pushback on a WG holding an interim meeting instead of meeting at an IETF main meeting. Yes, cross-WG communication and all that. > > However, looking at my schedule, I really can't see myself justifying what will be a two week interruption to fly out to Yokohama for a two hour meeting and more importantly, I don't think many of the folk who I would be looking to collaborate with at that meeting will either. > > Now that IETF main meeting time is becoming an increasingly scarce commodity, perhaps it is time to re-evaluate the old view that interim meetings should not be a substitute for having a session at a main meeting and instead start encouraging that for certain types of work. > > Particularly early on in a WG, a two day interim can be a lot more use than a two hour main meeting event.