On 5/14/19 5:29 PM, Nico Williams wrote:
I mean, you're trying to get people to sign on to review, and even
co-author. I.e., you have to advertise your proposal. How will you do
that if you don't get a chance to tell people about it? Especially in a
BoF.
A good case can be made for presentations in BOFs.
It would also be useful if latecomers to a WG, and "tourists", could
have a way to get up to speed. If we had better ways of doing that,
our standards might benefit from earlier review from a more diverse set
of interests. IETF Last Call is too late to fix much.
I have been wondering if it would be worth it for authors or WGs to
publish "catch up" slides, or even to hold "catch up" sessions in
advance of WG meetings, so that newcomers and tourists could contribute
more effectively (less disruptively) if they chose to attend the WG
sessions.
I also wonder if there might be a significant "market" for such sessions
from the broader technical population, from people interested in what
the future might hold. Maybe there could be N days of "catch up"
presentations and BOFs, followed by M days of working group sessions
with NO presentations. (As a first approximation, let N=2 and M=3, and
tweak as necessary; put BOFs on the last of the N days.) Most WG
participants wouldn't need to attend the first N days (though some might
want to see what's going on in other groups/areas), whereas those who
just wanted an overview, wouldn't need to attend the last M days.
WGs not actually having working sessions at the meeting should still
produce/update "catch up" presentations or at least update their
slides. Those attending WG working sessions and who weren't caught up
on the mailing lists, would be expected to read the slides before
attending.
All sessions should be remotely accessible for free, though in-person
attendees will of course have more occasions for fine lunches and dinners.
Maybe there could also be some renumeration (or at least free
registration) for those doing presentations, which could offset some of
the meeting costs for active participants and enable a more diverse set
of people to participate. (We'd have to be careful, though, to not
create perverse incentives. Having people create proposals in the
hopes of deriving money from presentations about those proposals might
not be good for the Internet. But free registration seems fairly
low-risk as long as the conference makes enough money from additional
attendance to offset the cost of those attending for free.)
Keith
