It's interesting watching the ongoing ossification of the IETF and its workflow process. RFCs were originally actual requests for comments. (What was the first internet-draft requesting comments?) Workgroups begat BOFs to possibly lead to workgroups. BOFs became formalised to beget Bar BOFs once the BOF process was formalised. I was half-expecting bar seating reservations and waitlists, with applications for bar discussions to be accepted by a new ad-hoc committee, leading to Bar Queue Grouping Formaulation discussions for Bar BOF applications... And now we have side meetings? Bar, humbug. Lloyd Wood lloyd.wood@xxxxxxxxxxx http://about.me/lloydwood ________________________________ From: Suresh Krishnan <suresh.krishnan@xxxxxxxxx> To: IETF Discussion <ietf@xxxxxxxx> Cc: IESG <iesg@xxxxxxxx> Sent: Saturday, 27 May 2017, 6:25 Subject: Side meetings experiment at IETF 99 Hi all, The IESG has discussed how to improve the path for potential new topics to be discussed transparently in the IETF community. For some cross-area topics, it is quite useful to have active conversation among a group of people to work on defining the potential work and how it interacts with existing efforts. As the IETF week is quite busy, it can be a challenge to arrange these side-meetings to avoid conflicts. To facilitate the scheduling of these conversational side-meetings, the IESG has decided to provide a meeting room at IETF 99 in Prague for around 30 people, with a U-shaped table, that will be available for first-come first-served (FCFS) signup online as soon as the final IETF meeting agenda is published. This experiment will be conducted for IETF 99 in Prague and will replace AD approval for rooms for side-meetings for potential new topics. Proponents of potential new topics are reminded that the BoF deadline is June 2; this includes non-WG forming BoFs. The on-site signup FCFS room (seats about 16) will continue to be available at IETF 99. Thanks Suresh (on behalf of the IESG)