Subject: Re: [Manycouches] Hallway track

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Mar 2020 10:00:15 -0500

Kathleen Moriarty <[email-masked]> wrote:
    > How about an informal call tied to a WG or set of working groups where
    > people have a round table to discuss hot topics or where they need
    > help.  I mention this as I’m part of a remote/work from home team.  We
    > have a weekly call that does just this.  The manager is extremely
    > positive and keeps cohesion in the team, but team members really do
    > work together.

I think that this works great when people are in relatively close time zones,
and report to the same management system.

    > Much of what we get done in the hallway are likely these types of
    > discussions where people offer to help work on something new, that
    > impacts them, or helping someone who has a problem where they have
    > expertise.

I think that the hallway track is actually about 100 simultaneous 1:1 calls,
in which two or three other people get sucked in because they were near one
of the people when the discussion starts.

So we need a tool that allows everyone to be in the same room to overhear
each other, but at the same time, we need actual separate calls.  That's a
call order for a tool.
I think that tools like SecondLife regularly had difficulty with such a thing.

    > I’d like us to figure out how we progress this conversation and reduce
    > meetings to 2 a year.  We’re likely to fumble a little the first time
    > and fix it.

    > As for an example of a working group interim call that made progress,
    > listen to the last TEEP session.  They ran through issues and each was
    > discussed to resolution until time ran out.  We can make this work.

Yes, that's the way to make individual WG sessions work when we have a base
document with active participants who are already self-identified and are
motivated to work on progressing it.

I think that it works much less if we have disagreement about the problem
being solved, if we have competing documents, or if the people that we need
are not clearly identified yet.

As difficult as ADD/ABCD was to do in person (over two IETF meetings) and in
a hundred hallway conversations, and thousands of emails, I don't think we
could have done that in a virtual-only.

Lest you take this as too negative: I'm actually for having far more virtual
interims, and I'd like to see *ALL* routine WG work happen virtually.
That leaves us more time for the non-routine WG work.

--
Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>, Sandelman Software Works
 -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-

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From: Kathleen Moriarty <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2020 10:34:32 -0500

Hi Michael, all,

> and report to the same management system.

We're a global team.  A couple of weeks ago a colleague in China used his
time to show pictures of what things look like near him these days.  He
showed pictures of normally busy areas that were desolate.

> of the people when the discussion starts.

We need to think out of the box and not block on the ideal.  Calls where
people can discuss things and raise concerns or even sometimes something a
little off track aids in bringing people together in similar ways.  If we
are to reduce to 2 meetings a year, this is one idea - a more casual round
table call that may be on WGs and maybe some others on general interest
areas.

> I think that tools like SecondLife regularly had difficulty with such a

I'd hate to jump to needing a tool instead of using what we have and then
improving upon it as we learn.  A simple round table call works really well
for my team and we use zoom, mostly audio.

> are not clearly identified yet.

So let's figure out how to do these things.  Let's not block on obstacles.

> That leaves us more time for the non-routine WG work.

Good, let's approach it that way then.  Noting obstacles is good, but
keeping a positive tone gets a lot more accomplished.  An increasing number
of companies have bailed on this meeting.  The IETF hasn't moved to all
remote (yet), but if they do we will have limited time to figure out how
best to make each session as productive as possible and to enable "hallway"
conversations with short notice.  There will be fumbles, but we can learn
from them and improve next time.  I'd love to see us drop down to 2
in-person meetings a year.  I think this is an opportunity to figure out
how to get there.

Best regards,
Kathleen

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> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/manycouches
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-- 

Best regards,
Kathleen

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Mar 2020 11:53:58 -0500

> showed pictures of normally busy areas that were desolate.

And, so you did this during a time zone when this colleague was in the office?
The ICANN all-virtual thread pointed out that working at home in the evenings
(or middle of the night) is often difficult for many people: aside from the
family demands, often Internet connectivity is poor (or subject to national firewalls).

I'm not saying that the idea does not have merit.  I've worked in distributed
teams for over 20 years, and we have had "stand-up" meetings online.
We used H323 at one point, because there was nothing else. Before Skype.

    > table call that may be on WGs and maybe some others on general interest

I would like this to work.
In person, it works because people get hungry and want cookies, and thus the
number of places where they can be found is few.

    > in-person meetings a year.  I think this is an opportunity to figure out

okay.
I've been among three who are always in the "hallway" XMPP chat room for over a decade.
Why is that?

---

From: Nick Doty <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Mar 2020 17:55:08 -0500

> On Mar 2, 2020, at 10:34 AM, Kathleen Moriarty <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> I'd hate to jump to needing a tool instead of using what we have and then improving upon it as we learn.  A simple round table call works really well for my team and we use zoom, mostly audio.
>  
> Noting obstacles is good, but keeping a positive tone gets a lot more accomplished.  An increasing number of companies have bailed on this meeting.  The IETF hasn't moved to all remote (yet), but if they do we will have limited time to figure out how best to make each session as productive as possible and to enable "hallway" conversations with short notice.  There will be fumbles, but we can learn from them and improve next time..  I'd love to see us drop down to 2 in-person meetings a year.  I think this is an opportunity to figure out how to get there.

I think it’s useful and important for us to explicitly consider the goals of the hallway track and start experimenting with the difficult work of supporting those important use cases for remote attendance. I agree that the hallway seems to me more like a large number of small-group calls, with some flexibility for identifying mini topics and pulling the relevant people in to them.

In that way it reminds me of Birds of a Feather, and that might suggest some ways forward for a computer-mediated version. If there was a synchronous hallway session with a long list of small videoconferences and each one could post a few words about their topic, then other remote attendees could scan the list, see the conversations going on, and join in on the very particular topic they also want to discuss or start a new chat by briefly describing a mini topic. (This sounds more achievable than accomplishing overhearable audio for a large set of remote conversations, and also might be more effective at getting topics self-described.) And people could be encouraged to re-assign and join other small conversations on other short topics that come up, as announced in the larger list.

I also think some mostly random pairing could provide some of the utility of hallway conversations over cookies. I have found it valuable in attending IETF meetings not just the particular sessions or the specific conversations I wanted to have to pursue a known work item but also the casual conversation with people working in areas I know nothing about.

Are there other use cases people have for the hallway track?

Cheers,
Nick

---

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2020 01:15:16 +0100

How about starting with something thats even more official than
hallway (aka: more important to IETF ?) but similar in structure
albeit maybe easier to tool:

Newcomers Quick Connections / Welcome reception

The newcomers quick connection at best is structured such that
ADs and/or WG-chairs are spread around tables and do Q&A. 

To double the physical experiene i would really like to see an app
providing a very simple birds eye view of tables, simple icons for the
role of people (aka: badge equivalent) on each table and the
ability to hover with the mouse to see names/roles. When you
then click on a table you get a standard chat channel, but of
course with the whole chat history of the table available.

Hallway needs to add dynamic creation of "tables" (chat channels),
ability to lock out chat history  to new joiners (presumed
private discussion) and maybe more.

I'd be happy if the visualization is not more advanced than
nethacks or muds. Whatever is coded fastest.

Cheers
    Toerless

On Wed, Mar 04, 2020 at 05:55:08PM -0500, Nick Doty wrote:
> I think it???s useful and important for us to explicitly consider the goals of the hallway track and start experimenting with the difficult work of supporting those important use cases for remote attendance. I agree that the hallway seems to me more like a large number of small-group calls, with some flexibility for identifying mini topics and pulling the relevant people in to them.
> 

-- 
---
[email-masked]

---

From: Stephen Farrell <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2020 00:25:17 +0000

On 04/03/2020 22:55, Nick Doty wrote:
> I think it’s useful and important for us to explicitly consider the
> goals of the hallway track and start experimenting with the difficult
> work of supporting those important use cases for remote attendance. I
> agree that the hallway seems to me more like a large number of
> small-group calls, with some flexibility for identifying mini topics
> and pulling the relevant people in to them.
Many hallway chats start with a couple of people exiting
a room to get coffee, one saying something like: "WTF was
<person> on about? That was pure nonsense..."

There's an element of hallway chat that wouldn't benefit
from being public. I don't know to what extent that's
important, but such non public utterances are, I think,
very common in real hallways.

Cheers,
S.

---

From: Jay Daley <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2020 13:30:59 +1300

> On 5/03/2020, at 1:25 PM, Stephen Farrell <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> 
> 

I guess that’s why Toerless was proposing: 

"Hallway needs to add dynamic creation of "tables" (chat channels),
ability to lock out chat history  to new joiners (presumed
private discussion) and maybe more."

Jay  (trying to understand the feature set that needs to be supported, not expressing an opinion on what it should be)

> 
> Cheers,
> S.
> <0x5AB2FAF17B172BEA.asc>_______________________________________________
> Manycouches mailing list
> [email-masked]

-- 
Jay Daley
IETF Executive Director
[email-masked]
+64 21 678840

---

From: Stephen Farrell <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2020 00:41:17 +0000

Hiya,

On 05/03/2020 00:30, Jay Daley wrote:
> ability to lock out chat history  to new joiners (presumed private
> discussion) and maybe more."

Yeah, that is pretty close, and I'd not noticed it in
Toerless' mail;-( Sorry for the noise.

I guess the real-world hallways are much more complex
(e.g. someone saying something "non-public" knowing
full well someone "not meant to hear" is really standing
behind them:-), and can't be fully replicated online.

> Jay  (trying to understand the feature set that needs to be
> supported, not expressing an opinion on what it should be)
Sure. In the same spirit (of not-opining:-) I don't
claim to understand the relative importance of various
aspects of the real hallway. I also don't know (but
do have an opinion:-) whether or not we ought first
try figure out what we consider important about the
real hallway before debating possible features of an
online one. (Knowing that much of what we do think
is important won't be feasible online.)

Cheers,
S.

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 Mar 2020 12:29:18 -0500

> and pulling the relevant people in to them.

I agree with you, up to here.

    > In that way it reminds me of Birds of a Feather, and that might suggest
    > some ways forward for a computer-mediated version. If there was a
    > synchronous hallway session with a long list of small videoconferences
    > and each one could post a few words about their topic, then other
    > remote attendees could scan the list, see the conversations going on,
    > and join in on the very particular topic they also want to discuss or
    > start a new chat by briefly describing a mini topic.

There are two problems I have here.
First, there won't be any conversation going on until the second (or maybe
third) person arrives, so it will be hard to know what is going on.

Second, hallway conversations usually work where person A walks up to person
B, to ask "can you explain your microphone objection again to me?" (or some
such thing).   Person B is often not alone, but was actually discussing
something else (the outstanding quality of the cookies, or the work they need
to do on draft foo-bar) with person C.
Mid-way through repeating themselves, person B will be interrupted by person
C, to ask a clarifying question, which reveals to both A and B why they were
having difficulties communicating.

At no point did persons B or C look for a list of topics that would interest
them.   Had A been passive, person B would not have walked up to them, as
they were having a different discussion at that time.

    > I also think some mostly random pairing could provide some of the
    > utility of hallway conversations over cookies. I have found it valuable
    > in attending IETF meetings not just the particular sessions or the
    > specific conversations I wanted to have to pursue a known work item but
    > also the casual conversation with people working in areas I know
    > nothing about.

    > Are there other use cases people have for the hallway track?

I think that reproducing the hallway track is a seriously difficult thing.

--
]               Never tell me the odds!                 | ipv6 mesh networks [
]   Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works        |    IoT architect   [
]     [email-masked]  http://www.sandelman.ca/        |   ruby on rails    [

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 Mar 2020 12:30:05 -0500

> <person> on about? That was pure nonsense..."

Followed by, "what? it makes perfect sense, you just weren't listening"

    > very common in real hallways.

+1