Subject: [Manycouches] soft meeting issues

From: Michael Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 May 2020 10:50:31 -0700

Hi All,

I coincidentally posted on the ietf list about how bar bofs are going to 
work (or not more likely) in the face of the pandemic. There is a larger 
issue that a lot of things happen outside of the formal running of a wg 
meeting, bar bofs being one casualty. A lot of productive work happens 
outside of the context of the meeting including lingering on after the 
meeting, physically being in proximity of people you might want to talk 
to, etc, etc. I'm not sure if you all intend to map out the problem 
space, but what happens outside of confines of actual wg meetings is 
pretty important too, and might need to be considered.

I wrote up a blog post about this a couple of weeks ago more in the vein 
of teleworking, but may be interesting here too.

https://rip-van-webble.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-water-cooler-problem.html

Mike

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From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 May 2020 12:11:56 -0400

Michael Thomas <[email-masked]> wrote:
    > I wrote up a blog post about this a couple of weeks ago more in the
    > vein of teleworking, but may be interesting here too.

    > https://rip-van-webble.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-water-cooler-problem.html

I was reading your water cooler post over the past few days between online
meetings.   The "clueless" list was intringing.  I wonder if anyone has a
version of this where everyone gets a pseudonym... which would allow a senior
Cisco Fellow to ask questions too :-)

One of the useful things about the post-meeting "hang-around", (especially
when it's at the end of the day: no rush off to lunch or another session), is
that it allows anyone who isn't steeped in the art of that WG (a "tourist")
to walk up to someone who was hogging the mic line to ask a ("stupid")
clarifying question about some base part of the technology.
This includes senior people (up to and including ADs) who have been suddendly
made aware of some controversy in the WG.
  "Hey, can you just clue me into this debate. Why didn't the WG do X?"
  (there usually is a good, but not obvious answer, often, it would not
  be backward compatible, or it would violate security system FOO)

One of the good hang-around places is Jabber in my opinion.

One of the major reasons, I think, why integrated Jabber into Meetecho is
BAD, is because the identities asserted that way are *NOT* long-term, and
because the chat appears to go away when the meeting ends.
Back when I first started remote attending, I put the "hallway" and "ROLL"
jabbers into my pidgin config, and and they remain, and I'm always logged
into them.

It seems that getting reliable XMPP servers has become somewhat of a
problem. It was worse a few years ago when jabber.org just became unuseable,
but it got better, I think...  I suspect that LetsEncrypt certs for servers
has helped.  I think that the IETF probably should operate it's own jabber
server for end-identities.

MAYBE we should have 10K jabber rooms: one for each RFC.  That might help
people. I would certainly be willing to leave myself logged into the room of
each RFC I've authored, especially since pidgin will let me do that without
having to keep a tab open for them until there is activity.  MAYBE.
MIGHT be a major annoyance and source of spam.
BUT, it would make us more accessible at least to each other.

--- diversion
I don't know why people have such intensive desires to have all the stuff in
one browser tab; I guess it's because the Windows window-manager has always
sucked really badly, but it seems that OSX people have the same issues.

(Yes, I'm a fossil: I still run vtwm on my main desktop. 30 years and
running... since I switched from StunStools and Masscomp/RTU/Cadence to
X-windows.  But, I put full GNOME/Ubuntu on my laptop last fall, and while
it's not as efficient, I still don't have the issues people have, especially
with an external monitor)

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

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From: Michael Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 May 2020 09:52:08 -0700

> Cisco Fellow to ask questions too :-)

It was strikingly egalitarian. Fellows did need to have pseudonyms to 
ask... clueless questions :) It was sort of the point. I think Van 
Jacobson created the list, iirc.

>    be backward compatible, or it would violate security system FOO)
Yes, it hard overstate how much of this is a social problem as much of a 
technical problem to overcome. Understanding those interactions is key 
to any attempt at providing a virtual analog. In your example, it's ok 
to be clueless one on one/few but it is not ok to do so in the context 
of a formal meeting. Getting all of those interactions down along with 
their nuances is what is really needed before going into solution space 
-- not that I'm suggesting this is the right venue for either. Which 
actually brings up a salient point: until these kinds of problems can  
be addressed somehow/somewhere/by something, virtual IETF meetings are 
definitionally going to be quite inferior to f2f meetings. I'd venture a 
guess that f2f meetings are worth about 50% of the meeting value, and 
50% of the soft meeting variety value. We could quibble about the actual 
split, but I hope nobody would disagree that the soft part is pretty 
big. So what on earth are we going to about it?
> One of the good hang-around places is Jabber in my opinion.

I haven't been to an IETF meeting in a good long time, so I really have 
no idea of how the Jabber dynamic has evolved. But in normal conference 
calls everybody hangs up and that it that. The thing thing that Jabber 
doesn't recreate (at last to my knowledge) is the dynamic of splitting 
off into smaller groups since it's just one jumble of a disconnected 
conversations and worse socially available for everybody to see when 
that might not be desirable. Whatever the solution might be would need 
to take that dynamic into account too.

> jabbers into my pidgin config, and and they remain, and I'm always logged

Absolutely. You want more rather than fewer "meeting" spaces to have 
impromptu chats. But there remains a serious problem of judging somebody 
receptiveness to a private chat which is much easier in real life: are 
they standing around gabbing already, or are they looking like they're 
off to their next meeting? How would you even move a group chat into a 
more private chat? How do you know whether it is open to outsiders or is 
truly a private chat?

> server for end-identities.

I assume that text chat is not especially challenging for hardware these 
days, especially for a couple thousand people. A couple of 2 core vm's 
from Linode cost about $40/month. If there are reliability concerns, 
it's probably worth it internalizing it since it's not just a 
nice-to-have, but would be mission critical for virtual meetings. This 
is at least a very solvable problem :)

Mike