On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 3:53 PM, John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > > --On Sunday, January 10, 2016 07:40 +1300 Brian E Carpenter > <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >>> (4) "Couldn't make a determination, due eitherto lack of >>> attendance by key people or some technical issue.". As with >>> (3), little has been lost and we can always hold a physical >>> BOF under traditional rules if needed. >> >> Speaking from the time-zone-challenged corner, I see a high >> risk of hitting (4) rather frequently. Of course you can argue >> that there is also a high risk of hitting (4) with face2face >> BOFs at unpopular destinations. > > Yes. I could also suggest that the virtual plan gives more > flexibility of scheduling to accommodate people who are > "normally" time-zone-challenged or even of holding two sessions > at different times and collecting information from both. (4) > may certainly happen and, again, if it does, it seems to me that > we gain some small amount of information and don't lose much. > We will clearly have to experiment and learn as we go along but > it seems to me that, if we don't need just about everyone in the > same physical room at the same time, it opens up all sorts of > possibilities. > >> That said, it does seem worth a try. > > thx. > > john > > p.s. I read Phillip's note, but I see most of the issues he has > raised as more "bad charter", "bad WG management", "failure of > the IESG to supervise adequately", or even "not enough > mechanisms for feedback by the broader community into how a WG > is going" and not specifically BOF problems. The BOF part of the issue is what the purpose of the BOF should be. I think we spend rather too little time discussing what the general problem space is. There are main two ways that a WG can fail. The first is that they pick something so big and complex that they can't deliver. We haven't done that for a long time. The second is that they tackle a problem so small that either nobody cares or nobody can actually make use of it without the rest of the support required. We do that a lot. Having a virtual BOF and spending a day or two days brainstorming the problem area is probably a better use of people's time than a lot of other things we do.