| FWIW, I think having open time during the day is great, but if we’re going to do that, the way to do it is by expanding our Friday, not by shortening our Wednesday. Or else being more disciplined about our use of meeting time, which we very much are not. I suspect that it is this second knob that the IESG is trying to turn. Unfortunately I think that in order to do this job effectively, better tooling is required. Right now we have very poor conflict detection tooling, which essentially only works for WG chairs. I had a little brainstorm about tooling prior to the last IETF, when I had a slot with four sessions in it I wanted to attend, but unfortunately didn’t have the energy to actually lay down any code. I think we would also need even shorter slots, and more of them, to make this work. But for that to work, we’d need to get disciplined about how we use time. This means that WG chairs need to say “no” a lot more than they currently do to presentations that aren’t ready for discussion. While I understand the tendency to get triggered by any change to the status quo, I actually support the IESG in trying to work this issue, because it’s an issue that won’t go away as long as we have more working groups than time. I served on an IESG where we discussed this, but took no action, and that was quite a few years ago. It’s high time that some creativity was applied to the problem. I think our time would be better spent trying to figure out how to make the IETF function under its present workload than requesting a return to the status quo ante, which, quite frankly, still had a _lot_ of conflicts, and was in no way satisfactory. |
