During the plenary, there was a strong pitch made for a significantly increased number of virtual meetings, maybe even every few weeks.. I want to play devil's advocate and point out the downsides: (1) We have usually thought that the IETF is at its best when the vast majority of participants are designers, implementers, and people with primary product responsibility rather than, at the other extreme, professional standardizers. For at least some organizations, having to commit regular blocks of time (or very long blocks of time) to specific standards work will trigger the same sorts of "are those people too valuable to do this or can we commit fewer or less valuable people" reviews that are sometimes triggered by meetings in resorts or other exotic and/or other places that are perceived as exceptionally expensive or attractive to tourists. In many other standards bodies, including several whose work the IETF has treated with some contempt in the past, there is a repeated pattern in which the first generation of work actually engages those who understand the architectural, design, and implementations but later generators tend to be taken over by people whose jobs (and skills) are in developing standards as a procedural matter and/or protecting company interests in already-developed product plans. If we are inclined toward shifting toward more interim meetings rather than emphasizing asynchronous email communication, we should ask ourselves about the risks of thereby shifting the profiles of the participants and the possible consequences of doing that. (2) Historically, we have considered active cross-area participation and review as one of the strengths of the IETF. As part of that, we've cited meetings that pull everyone together for much of a week as an opportunity to get people to drop in on WGs with which they aren't actively familiar. That doesn't work as well with remote participation although, if I've set a week aside for IETF, dropping in on a WG about which I'm merely curious is fairly easy and maybe likely. It is quite subjective, but my sense is that we've seen a rising percentage of people participating in the IETF who are interested in a single topic or even a single WG. If we are interested in crossfertilization across sets of skills and interests (not merely the fallback of "area reviews" near or during IETF Last Call), then, while we probably cannot resist tendencies toward extreme specialization, we probably should not encourage them. In that context, isolated interim WG meetings that people are likely to sign up for or participate in only if they are specifically interested in that WG and its subject matter are likely to reinforce isolation and work that isn't seen from other perspectives until IETF Last Call (if then). (3) For those for whom listing to, or expressing themselves in, spoken English is not comfortable, an all-remote virtual interim meeting may be even more of a barrier to full participation and input than a mostly f2f one. Noting other recent conversations about slides and slide contents, that situation is even worse if the same requirements about early posting of meeting materials that apply to IETF f2f meetings don't apply to interims. I note that the IESG Statement on Interim Meetings (https://www.ietf.org/iesg/statement/interim-meetings.html) does not appear to impose that requirement on virtual interims (I believe its coverage of f2f interim meetings is adequate for that set of special issues. None of those concerns is an argument against an occasional interim meeting, especially when a real-time conversation may help resolve controversial issues (and more especially where it is possible that those issues result from misunderstandings or miscommunication). But, to the extent to which people are advocating more and more interim meetings (either virtual or f2f) as a normal way of doing business), we need to be careful about possible side effects, most of which are not mentioned in the IESG Statement. best, john