On 5/26/17 6:43 PM, John C Klensin wrote: > (1) <rant> Suresh's description of these informal meetings match > reasonably closely something we did in the distant past. It was > calls a "BOF". Over the years, that concept of a BOF as a > relatively informal session for discussion of new ideas and > other things that were not ready for WG charters, morphed into > very formal arrangements requiring formal proposals more than > six weeks in advance of IETF meetings and approval by the IESG > and advice from the IAB. People dealt with that problem with > formally organized Bar BOFs, a combination that would have been > considered an oxymoron when BOFs were more informal gatherings, > which led to requests for meeting rooms for side meetings and > now sign-up arrangements for those meeting rooms.</rant> I agree with all of this, although I think it's very easy to move from less structure to more structure and extremely difficult to move from more structure to less structure. This weighty process stuff was put in place to solve some problem, and I think (but am not completely sure) that that problem is related to resource contention and shortages, where "resource" is probably some combination of time/attention of the I*, meeting rooms, etc. But, of course, the problem of how to have relatively unstructured but productive interactions hasn't gone away, so we keep adding more, er, "stuff" to the process of finding ways to talk with each other. And then the culture has changed as well, with increasing participation from people whose job it is to go to standards meetings bringing in process expectations from organizations with more formal structures. I'll add that it's kind of weird, at least to me, to say that people will get supported resources to brainstorm together informally but only if they grab that resource first. It would be nice to find some way to strip away some of the weight in our processes. I'm still intrigued by the IRSG experiment with letting groups meet for a year and seeing what they come up with, then axing them if the work isn't up to snuff, although that may not translate well to the broader IETF organization. In the meantime, over the past few years I've increasingly found that the best place to grab some informal chat and whiteboarding time to work through some ideas at meetings is the hackathon (which is, of course, not its intent, but there we are anyway). Melinda
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