On 5/17/19 9:44 AM, John C Klensin wrote:
But Mark, I've never seen any WG work well if there is
controversy or disagreement about scope, and more f2f meetings
-- at IETF or otherwise-- typically turn into more debates about
scope and objectives.
As far as I can tell, this depends.
People who have met in person - perhaps even just once - have a much
better sense of how the others think, than those who have only
interacted over email or similar "text only" media. I suspect that
people with different ideas of scope can not only more easily arrive at
a consensus on scope in a face-to-face meeting, they can more easily
arrive at a consensus on scope over email if they've already met in person.
Sometimes, however, there are irreconcilable differences. The worst
cases of this I've seen have been when there were participants from
multiple companies with conflicting agendas of how they wanted to
manipulate the market, and part of each of these companies' strategies
was to influence IETF standards in order to support their agendas. In
such cases the participants sponsored by those companies were not
actually free to work out what was best for the Internet as a whole.
I'm not sure that IETF can do much about this, but it may help if the
ADs realize if this is the situation. But yes, it's unlikely that more
than say 2 face to face meetings will help such a group to converge on a
reasonable scope.
(Then again, it's quite common in my experience for a working group to
be chartered in such a way as to mask inherent tussles between different
user communities or different layers of the network, by giving the
group a narrow charter that prevents the group from attempting to
resolve those tussles. In such a case, the group may appear to make
progress, only to produce a result that either can't be successful in
the real world, or one which unfairly favors one legitimate interest
over another, and which may in practice degrade interoperability rather
than improving it. So we shouldn't assume that the groups with
forcibly narrowed scope are more successful just because they don't
spend time on scope discussions or because they get RFCs out the door
sooner.)
But I do think that face-to-face meetings can help a group reach
consensus on scope if the conditions otherwise permit it.
(What I don't know is whether remote participation media with
high-fidelity audio and video would work well enough to rely less on the
face-to-face meetings. Part of the problem is that different users'
network conditions and equipment vary, so what works well for one
participant may not work well for another. Another part of the problem
is that video conferencing software I've seen seems better suited to
"presentation" format discussions - where there's one speaker at any
time and everyone else is the audience - than to interactive discussions.)
Keith
