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.
