Hi Eliot, Thanks for writing this up. You can see that the LLC Board has an agenda item to start discuss it on our next call on August 7 [1]. We had some initial discussion some months back about whether to work on an environmental impact policy as part of our initial set of organizational policies and did not end up prioritizing it given the rest of the bootstrapping effort, but it’s certainly worth coming back to. Some of the concerns you raise are more about what the community wants and needs as far as meeting cadence, which puts them less in the purview of the LLC and more in the purview of the IESG as far as synthesizing what the community is looking for. Therefore I’ve started a discussion within the IESG about this. Of course any changes we make need to account for existing policies (draft-ietf-mtgvenue-meeting-policy in particular), the fact that we have venues booked several years in advance already, the fact that we have pre-announced our meeting dates to the Internet community even more years in advance, ongoing discussions with potential future meeting hosts and venues about specific dates and locations, etc. In short, immediate change here is unlikely to be feasible, so hopefully no one is expecting that. Thanks again, Alissa [1] https://www.ietf.org/media/documents/2019-08-07_-_Agenda_-_LLC_Board_Meeting.pdf > On Jul 22, 2019, at 6:09 PM, Eliot Lear <lear@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Hi everyone, > > From time to time we talk about changing our meeting modalities, and we certainly have done so a bit. Not so much the plenary, face to face meetings. For the last 28 years or so, we’ve been meeting three times per year (previously it was four!), and we will continue to do so for a while. But it’s at least possible that we could meet more effectively and maybe even with fewer plenaries. > > Many of us travel great distances just to attend a handful of working groups, especially if we are specialized. And those working groups meet for an hour or two, and then modulo the hallway conversations, were done. Being perfectly frank about my own motivations, my daughter wants to know why I generate so much CO2, in what is all too fast becoming her generation’s greatest challenge, and our generation’s greatest shame. > > Even so, I am not prepared to propose any particular recommendation, but rather find a way to get to that point through a concerted professional effort that is not performed on the ietf mailing list ;-) > > And so draft-lear-we-gotta-stop-meeting-like-this asks the LLC *not* to change our meeting structure, but to bring in the right people to study it in consultation with the IESG, and then to come back with some recommendations for the community’s consideration. There are no timetables in the draft. That’s because this might take some time. And yes there are some financial impacts to be considered, not to mention human impact, not just on standards making, but on the valuable work being done at the Hackathon, and in other activities that colocate with us. > > Anyway, have a read. See what you think. I’ll be mentioning this at a mic comment in the plenary. > > Eliot
