On 5/12/19 4:42 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
On 13-May-19 07:09, Keith Moore wrote:
On 5/12/19 2:54 PM, Carsten Bormann wrote:
But we absolutely need to get out of the mode of assuming that IETF WG meetings consist mostly of presentations with a little bit of discussion squeezed in.
Keith,
can you please explicitly shame the WGs where that happens?
(It appears that set is different from the set of WGs I attend.)
I've thought about doing so before, but (a) it wouldn't be a
representative sample, and (b) the last thing I need is to make even
more enemies in IETF. But in my broad experience over the past several
years (trying to get to one meeting per year since I'm generally not
sponsored), more WG meetings than not have seemed to have this
characteristic.
But there's a problem. It's common for either the speaker or the chairs
to ask "How many people have read the draft?" and to see fewer than 10
hands go up. What's the speaker supposed to do except show her slides?
(Which normally have too many words to be useful.) So the problem is
a bit more basic, IMHO. It's not the slides that are the problem in
themselves. It's the fact of discussing drafts that haven't got people
interested enough to bother reading them.
I think the two reinforce each other.
Many WGs seem to take on work too easily (sometimes because the group is
chartered to encompass all of a certain kind of work, rather than trying
to solve some particular problem). And it's almost as if nobody wants
to deny someone a chance to work on an RFC, so there's a tendency for
lots of people to support WG adoption of a draft, and few willing to
object. The question posed in the meeting is usually "How many people
are willing to work on this?" rather than "Is this draft worthy of this
WG's precious resources?". Then the group's face time is divided
between lots of drafts, maybe several for which there isn't widespread
interest. (IMO IETF now publishes too many RFCs per year, and the
relevance and quality suffer accordingly.)
And maybe when people attend a WG meeting and see lots of documents
being discussed, without much support being required for any of them, it
seems like there's always room for one more.
And there are sometimes many tourists at a meeting. Overall I want to
encourage tourists - we need more cross-area review, we're too siloed as
it is. But we shouldn't take up precious meeting time going through
slides to accommodate them. Sure, it's a lot of work to read all of
the I-Ds for every WG meeting you drop into. But maybe it's not
unreasonable to expect those in the room to have read the slides in
advance of the meeting. And maybe those who haven't read the slides
should participate "remotely" - watching the meeting from elsewhere in
the venue. Then the real meeting rooms would be full of people who
actually are invested in the group's work, and the discussion should be
much more productive.
Keith
