Subject: RFC 6771 on Considerations for Having a Successful "Bar BOF" Side Meeting

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2012 13:27:52 -0700 (PDT)

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        RFC 6771

        Title:      Considerations for Having a Successful 
                    "Bar BOF" Side Meeting 
        Author:     L. Eggert, G. Camarillo
        Status:     Informational
        Stream:     IETF
        Date:       October 2012
        Mailbox:    [email-masked], 
                    [email-masked]
        Pages:      10
        Characters: 24724
        Updates/Obsoletes/SeeAlso:   None

        I-D Tag:    draft-eggert-successful-bar-bof-09.txt

        URL:        http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6771.txt

New work is typically brought to the IETF by a group of interested
individuals.  IETF meetings are a convenient place for such groups to
hold informal get-togethers to discuss and develop their ideas.  Such
side meetings, which are not reflected in the IETF meeting agenda and
have no official status, are often half-jokingly referred to as "bar
BOF" sessions to acknowledge that some of them may eventually lead to
a proposal for an official IETF BOF ("birds of a feather" session) on
a given topic.

During recent IETF meetings, many such "bar BOF" get-togethers have
been organized and moderated in ways that made them increasingly
indistinguishable from official IETF BOFs or sometimes even IETF
working group meetings.

This document argues that this recent trend is not helpful in
reaching the ultimate goal of many of these get-togethers, i.e., to
efficiently discuss and develop ideas for new IETF work.  It
encourages the organizers to consider the benefits of holding them in
much less formal settings and to also consider alternative means to
develop their ideas.  This document also recommends that the
community abandon the term "bar BOF" and instead use other terms such
as "side meeting", in order to stress the unofficial nature of these
get-togethers.  This document is not an Internet Standards Track 
specification; it is published for informational purposes.

INFORMATIONAL: This memo provides information for the Internet community.
It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Distribution of
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