> I'd want objective evidence that we get less cross-area review than > at some date in the past before worrying a great deal. It seems to me > that we are actually doing it more systematically than in the past. I think we do review in generally more systematically than in the past. And bulk of that happens outside meetings. But some of it also in meetings, e.g., BOF discussions. And in my totally unscientific gut feeling, we have more review of each output document from the IETF than in the past. Of course, the Internet has also changed, and each of us knows much less about everything than we did in the past. And the people have changed too. It would be difficult to measure quality, except maybe by observing IETF outputs actually work and be deployed in the marketplace. (I think on that metric we’re doing broadly fine, but of course the results vary great deal. But again, just personal feelings rather than objective measurements.) >> ... but it doesn't seem to me >> that the meetings obviously help with that except by accident. > > But those accidents - hearing about something by chance that you would > never discover by chance on-line - are a major part of the advantage of > our plenary weeks. Being all in one place and time zone allows those > useful accidents to happen. I doubt that most people have "helping review other work" very high on their list of motivations when the decide to attend an event in any organisation. In the interest of providing even more gut feeling-based data to this thread, I suspect the four top reasons are 1) driving their main own thing, 2) finding interesting new topics or collaboration that they or their company should work on in the industry, 3) general learning of what is going on and 4) side meetings. However, the three last reasons do lead to helping review other work in many cases, so... Jari
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