> On Aug 19, 2015:4:50 AM, at 4:50 AM, Leif Johansson <leifj@xxxxxx> wrote: > > On 2015-08-18 19:15, Phillip Hallam-Baker 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. > > Planing interims (esp. finding a time and place that folks can get > travel approval for) is usually a horrible exercise though… I think that is missing the point; the idea is to have virtual interim meetings (teleconferences with video i.e.: webex). While in-person meetings can be effective, in my experience repeated virtual meetings seem to achieve the same result without all of the headaches associated with planning/managing a physical meeting that people need to travel to. The travel issues people raised earlier (visas, cost, ability to herd all the cats to one place for a few days, etc…) still exist for any physical meeting and in some ways are worse because people carve out space for the main IETF meeting while most have packed schedules normally that are difficult to adjust for an interim physical meeting plus the travel on either side. Virtual ones enjoy the fact that while still having some of these challenges, most of the others are eliminated. And the benefit is that you can easily schedule many of these - even daily - without incurring any travel cost penalties. So if it takes 2 or 3 virtual meetings to accomplish what you might do in one physical one, but you didn’t spend a dime on traveling cost or time, this is a win. I will also point out that its also sometimes useful to fragment meetings into smaller working teams (i.e.: design/sub teams), and scheduling weekly/periodic meetings for those subsets to iterate on their specific work items is an effective option. In NETMOD this has been successful in moving a number of specific work items forward rapidly without the burden of scheduling a full WG interim meeting, its associated management overhead. —Tom