Subject: [112all] Proposed Experiment for IETF 112: Moving the Plenary

From: IETF Chair <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 Sep 2021 19:41:29 +0300

Hi,

fully online meetings have a shorter length of day, which complicates
scheduling sessions to minimize conflicts, compared to an in-person
meeting with longer meeting days. The lack of travel arrangements also
reduces the pressure to hold all events in a single week. However,
scheduling all events in a single week both reduces the impact on
attendees' schedules and encourages cross-review of ideas. Past survey
data suggest both broad satisfaction with the current format and
concern about the number of scheduling conflicts.

The plenary offers a unique opportunity to maximize benefits and
minimize costs. This single event consumes an entire 2-3 hour slot of
the meeting week across all tracks. Moving the plenary outside the
meeting week thus opens up eight long slots that can be used to
schedule other meetings. The experiment will test the hypothesis that
the plenary is compelling enough to draw attendees independently of the
rest of the meeting.

*** Proposal

For IETF 112, the plenary will occur on the Wednesday before the meeting
week (3 November 2021), in the time slot of 13:30-15:00 UTC, or
14:30-16:00 Madrid time. At notable extremes, this begins at 05:30 in
San Francisco and ends at 02:00 in Sydney, with some of the less
popular hours over the Pacific.

*** Feedback

The IESG invites feedback to the IESG mailing list
([email-masked]), especially if this proposal would change your ability
to attend the plenary. Such feedback would be most useful if received
within two weeks of the date of this email, as the IESG will then
finalize the decision whether to proceed with the experiment. Strong
feedback indicating the experiment would reduce the community’s ability
to attend the plenary might cause its cancellation.

*** Success Criteria

The IESG will evaluate the success of this experiment based on the
following criteria after its conclusion, in consultation with the
community.

* An improvement in survey responses reporting session conflicts
  compared to previous IETF online meetings

* Positive response to a new survey question about subjective
  satisfaction with the format change

* Elimination of a ninth track, and a reduction in formal conflicts in
  the final agenda compared to previous online meetings

* Little or no reduction in plenary attendance (< 15%) compared to other
  online plenaries in European time zones (i.e., IETF 108 and 110)

* The subjective experience of the IESG and Secretariat in attempting to
  minimize conflicts during IETF 112

This does not imply that all of these metrics must show
improvement for the experiment to be considered a success, or that
regression in any of them would indicate failure. The relative weights
of these considerations are a subject for IESG discussion and community
consultation.

Lars Eggert
IETF Chair, on behalf of the IESG