--On Saturday, November 10, 2018 11:18 +0100 Job Snijders
<job@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> Making the Friday optional (like at IETF103) increases the
> chances of people getting home for a full weekend of downtime.
>
> I see no risk of "the Thursday becoming the new Friday",
> to me the slippery slope argument makes no sense without
> supporting data.
Actually, Jeb, there is supporting data although you could
reasonably argue that it is too old, and things have changed
enough, to make it of little or no use (see below).
Once upon a time, IETF was a four day activity plus a few
ancillary meetings Sunday afternoon. No Saturdays and, except
for the IAB, IESG, Secretariat Staff, and NOC volunteers, no
Sunday mornings or early Sunday afternoons. And we wrapped up
at the end of the day on Thursday. Logistics (e.g., airline
schedules) might require people to stay around until Friday
morning but, again with the exception of IAB and IESG
post-meeting retrospectives, most people expected to be out as
early as possible on Friday. There was some "get out of
Thursday" attrition, but, at least IMO, not nearly as much as
one would expect from observations of how many people are around
on Friday and how many WGs prefer to avoid Friday meetings.
We also ran fewer parallel sessions -- I recall five, which the
Bangkok agenda seems to show seven or eight in many slots.
With careful planning, that reduces the number of people who are
forced into "two places at once" situations. And some people
thought we still had too many WGs. FWIW, a requirement for
fewer parallel meeting rooms expands our choice of venues and
might lower costs a bit.
>From one point of view, and especially as evidence mounts that
in-depth cross-area review is becoming less effective, this is a
choice between doing a lot of things and doing a smaller number
of things well.
Things have changed. The IETF has gotten bigger in terms of
participants. However, perhaps more important, I believe we
have ended up with fewer really active participants per WG
(perhaps because the people who do the work are spread too
thin). We have definitely gotten less selective about the
threshold for forming a WG and the conditions needed to get a
meeting slot or two and have put more stress on meetings and
less on mailing lists (a count of interim meetings is fairly
strong evidence of the latter).
I'm not certain that more selectivity, fewer WGs, fewer ADs,
etc., would be an improvement whether it led to shorter meetings
or not and am not advocating it at the moment, but it would
probably be clear that we are making choices more complex than
how many days we meet and that those choices have consequences.
john
