BTW, one thing to say about "rushed agendas" is that they are as likely to be the result of poor planning as lack of time. Some IETF working groups are very productive, and for those working groups, limited agenda time could in principle be a problem. However, these same IETF working groups could probably just have more virtual interims and achieve the same result, or possibly a better result, because interims do not discriminate against people who are not able to attend in person. Two hours of really good in-person discussion during an in-person meeting might be quite valuable to such a group.
Then there are groups where the chairs don't really know in advance what the hot topics are. Why not? Either because of sporadic participation, or poor planning, or because the working group is a "where we get things of class X done" group and not a "we're trying to do X" group. In both of these cases, the right approach is to put a little more effort into deciding how to best use the agenda time. The algorithm should not be "we have 90 minutes, and we have 9 presentations, so that's 10 minutes per presentation." It should start with "what work will we feel perfectly okay about if we don't get to it?" Okay, that gets zero time on the agenda until other work is complete. We do not need to schedule a second meeting slot for it. Then there's "what work would we feel really bad about if we didn't get to it?" If the answer is "none," then the working group should not meet. If the answer is "everything that's left," then maybe you have a problem, but I don't think that's a likely thing.
So then the working group can maybe focus on the stuff that's an absolute priority, and spend remaining time on the "nice to have" stuff, and completely blow off the "not important" stuff. That might be disappointing for the people whose stuff doesn't seem important to the WG. That's okay. Consider that the cost per ten minutes of agenda time is about $24,000 US. Think about that seriously. Does your topic really need ten minutes of working group time?
On Sat, Nov 10, 2018 at 12:49 PM Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, 10 Nov 2018, Ted Lemon wrote:
> I also flew home Friday morning. Interestingly, some of my colleagues
> actually did plan to use Friday, and this turns out to have been (arguably)
> a mistake, although I'm really glad to be home. I think that what we
> should do is to have the experiment mid-week, not at the end of the week,
> and to make Friday a regular meeting day, not a special day that ends early..
I booked my travels in August and wasn't aware of this "experiment" until
it was too late. Now, with the 6man side-meeting on friday I am happy I
was there, I got a few hours friday afternoon for things I wanted to do in
Bangkok and then took a midnight flight home.
A lot of flights leave Bangkok around midnight, at least Europe-bound. In
other cities it seems long distance flights leave more spread out. I think
this might be something that should be taken into account when it comes to
deciding how to schedule Fridays for meetings.
It felt I had more conflcits this week compared to earlier meetings. I
attend lots of different meetings, transport, internet area,
netconf/netmod. I was quite surprised by the "oh, nobody would ever want
to attend multicast and IPv6 standardisation so that's fine to schedule
at the same time" conflict this time around. I typically have conflicts,
but it felt this meeting was worse than average.
I also felt several sessions I attended were quite rushed and there wasn't
enough time for discussions and presentations.
--
Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@xxxxxxxxx
