I have long been surprised how tightly regulated BoFs are at the IETF, while I understand the thinking behind it, it still surprises me that such an open organization that doesn't even have "members" has a very regimented process for bringing people of shared interests together. In Prague there was the ability to request and book a room for adhoc and non-official discourse and meetings. This was a great idea and I'd like to see if done at every IETF. The BoF process as it currently stands is a useful tool to share to the broader IETF community workgroup ideas that are fairly fleshed out, have an existing problem/solution/deliverable plan and an established set of proponents. What they don't do is easy enable discussion, concept building, and proponent base building of new work that isn't as yet as clearly defined. To put it another way: the current process is good at filtering, refining, and defining extensions of stuff we already do, but it's not conducive to new work that is not easily mapped to what we already have in progress. Birds of a feather in many orgs serve as informal opportunities to float half backed ideas as well as problems you are encountering but done yet have formed solution proposals for. It's often the vague problems and half baked ideas where the major new, useful, and interesting work come from, and that is one aspect we are currently missing. The bookable adhoc rooms are a great start to enabling people to just get together and talk. I encourage more of this based upon my personal positive experience in Prague. Going beyond that there are a couple other ways to improve this stuff: o a way to announce adhoc meetings would be great, beyond blasting a generic email to either the main IETF list or to the attendees list. Perhaps a calendar channel people can subscribe to to receive invites to the adhocs. o some means to display in a public place the schedule of adhocs so people can look at the schedule of adhocs. Perhaps a webpage and some space at the IETF meeting itself. o some means to spin up ongoing communications with adhoc attendees and interested parties to share the adhoc discussion, and to build a community around the issue,problem , or idea. o a means to fast fail proposals, without discounting or ending discussion on the core problem/issue. Part of this is like the way twitter builds on the fly communities with users abilities to define new hashtags and others ability to follow it. post to it ,and to retweet posts to it. It's the easy, low cost, fast fail ability of new communities which is useful in capturing and growing news ideas that we would benefit from. -glenn Sent from my iPad