RE: Agenda experiment for IETF 103 in November in Bangkok

[Christer Holmberg <christer.holmberg@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

 

If Friday is a non-working day, we may end up in a situation where people stop showing up at the late Thursday sessions, and/or request their WGs not to be scheduled on late Thursday…

 

Regards,

 

Christer

 

From: ietf [mailto:ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Andrew G. Malis
Sent: 16 May 2018 14:03
To: Ted Lemon <mellon@xxxxxxxxx>
Cc: John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx>; Paul Wouters <paul@xxxxxxxxx>; ietf <ietf@xxxxxxxx>; IETF Chair <chair@xxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Agenda experiment for IETF 103 in November in Bangkok

 

I could not agree more with Ted. I much prefer that either Friday be a normal working day with sessions so we all plan on traveling home on Friday night or Saturday, or we just end on Thursday. No in-between, because then people will blow off Friday and leave anyway.

 

Cheers,

Andy

 

 

On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 12:24 PM, Ted Lemon <mellon@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The issue I see with this experiment is that I think that the predictions that nobody will stay for Friday is accurate—this belief produces a negative network effect that will mean that even people who would want to show up because the proposed schedule for Friday would in theory be useful won't show up, because they know that in practice there won't be a quorum of people who stay through Friday.   And this means that a lot of facilities will be paid for and not used.   So in that sense I think this is a bad idea.   If we aren't going to have meetings on Friday, Friday should just be a teardown day, and not a day when we hold meeting rooms available.

 

If we want to have informal meetings as described in the proposal, the way to do this is to announce that Friday will be a full day of meetings, just like any other day, announce that we will schedule popular meetings on Friday so that if you decide to leave Friday, you will miss those meetings, and then schedule the informal time in the middle somewhere as others have suggested.   It's always frustrating to me that meetings that I think are fairly important get scheduled on Friday and then nobody shows up for them because people already assumed that they could leave on Friday.   In that sense this proposal is a win for me, because it means I will not have to worry about that if I attend the Bangkok IETF.   But it seems like a waste of resources to hold informal meeting times when it's vanishingly unlikely that anyone at all will attend.

 

On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 11:09 AM, Behcet Sarikaya <sarikaya2012@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

 

 

On Mon, May 14, 2018 at 3:51 PM, Adam Roach <adam@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Replying to the thread in general rather than any one message: most of the responses so far have been focusing on perceived efficacy of informal meetings on Friday (which is good feedback, although I suspect it will be better informed after the experiment is run).

I have yet to see any comments on the fact that we have O(30) working groups ask not to be scheduled on Fridays every single meeting. One of my personal hopes for this experiment is that we learn whether we can avoid these requests (and the consequent scheduling complications, which are non-trivial) by simply removing the broadly unwanted Friday slots from consideration altogether.

I am curious if anyone has thoughts about how this particular scheduling difficulty can be addressed beyond what we might learn from the Bangkok experiment.

 

It seems like the experiment will go ahead :-)

 

My suggestion is:

either treat Friday as a regular work day and put complete scheduling on that day. I don't think companies treat Fridays special, you work on Friday like any other day, right?

 

 

 

or completely make it off. Now we are including Saturday in the meeting days and starting to eat up from the other side to make up for it, isn't that strange?

 

 

Regarding flight times, if the meeting is overseas, airline companies want you to stay one week, usually from Saturday/Sunday to next Saturday. So in Bangkok, I am going to have to stay on Friday in order to get a cheaper flight.

 

Why not get back to the good old Sunday-Friday schedule?

 

Behcet

/a