Subject: [mpls] Fwd: IETF 107 Virtual Meeting Agenda

From: Loa Andersson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Mar 2020 12:50:49 +0800

Working Group,

Forwarding to the list the message below (hope most of you have already
received it).

Well established working groups (like ours) will not be scheduled on 
this virtual IETF 107.

We will have virtual meetings before IETF 108. More info in a separate mail.

/Loa

MPLS wg co-chair

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: IETF 107 Virtual Meeting Agenda
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2020 11:34:54 -0700
From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Reply-To: [email-masked]
To: IETF Announcement List <[email-masked]>
CC: [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked]

We have created a virtual IETF 107 agenda because the in-person meeting 
was cancelled. This is a detailed email that explains our choices. 
Please read it to the end.

We prioritized the scheduling of BOFs, working groups meeting for the 
first time, and dispatch-style working groups. Existing working groups 
should know how to progress their work via email and (virtual) interims, 
and many of them have a solid basis to do that with participants who 
have been collaborating together for a long time. But BOFs and new WGs 
do not have that established working mode and usually benefit from 
dedicated meeting time for bootstrapping purposes, as well as from a 
participant base drawn from all IETF areas. Similarly, dispatch-style 
groups are aiming to dispatch new work that otherwise has not seen much 
previous discussion.
The virtual agenda is as follows, with all times listed in UTC:

Monday, March 23
20:00-22:00 TXAUTH
22:10-00:10 DISPATCH

Tuesday, March 24
20:00-22:00 ADD, RAW
22:10-00:10 MASQUE

Wednesday, March 25
20:00-21:30 WPACK, DRIP
21:40-22:40 GENDISPATCH
22:50-00:30 Plenary

Thursday, March 26
20:00-22:00 PRIVACYPASS
22:10-00:10 RIPT

Friday, March 27
20:00-22:00 SECDISPATCH
22:10-00:10 WEBTRANS

The total meeting block for WG and BOF sessions amounts to:
  Pacific Time                   13:00-17:10  (17:30 on Weds)
Eastern Time               16:00-20:10  (20:30 on Weds)
Coordinated Universal Time        20:00-00:10  (00:30 on Weds)
Central European Time          21:00-01:10  (01:30 on Weds)
India Standard Time            01:30-05:40  (06:00 on Weds)
China Standard Time          04:00-08:10  (08:30 on Weds)
Australian Eastern Standard Time       07:00-11:10  (11:30 on Weds)

We will be using Webex for all of these sessions. We will be posting 
training materials and online resources in an FAQ on the IETF web site 
next week for those who are unfamiliar with Webex.
This agenda, with links to the Webex sessions, will appear in the 
datatracker shortly. If you plan to attend any of these sessions and you 
are not already registered for IETF 107, we encourage you to register as 
a remote participant <https://www.ietf.org/how/meetings/register/>.

There will not be any other working group meetings, area meetings, or 
research group meetings scheduled between March 23 and March 27. HotRFC 
is cancelled. We are not providing virtual replacements for side 
meetings. The organizers of the Hackathon and the Code Sprint are 
working on virtual support for those events and they will communicate 
separately about those.
We are aiming to provide a “hallway” Webex meeting where participants 
can go to test audio and other Webex features and to find others who are 
attending IETF 107 virtually. The [email-masked] jabber room 
will also continue to be available. More information about these will be 
available on the FAQ page next week.

There are many trade-offs involved in scheduling an all-virtual meeting. 
We will be pleased if the BOFs on the agenda are able to form WGs after 
this. But if not, the virtual BOF will not count as one attempt against 
the usual allotment of two attempts to form a WG, given the unusual 
circumstances.

RFC 8713, which specifies the NomCom process, relies heavily on there 
being three meetings per year known as the first, second, and third 
meetings, respectively. We consider the virtual IETF 107 to be the first 
IETF meeting of 2020. We will be seating the new members of the 
2020-2021 IESG, IAB, and IETF LLC Board at the virtual plenary. We are 
considering the implications of the cancelled Vancouver meeting for 
NomCom volunteer qualification specified in RFC 8713 Section 4.14 and we 
will be inviting community discussion about that soon.
We chose to focus this agenda on the 4.5 hours between 20:00 UTC and 
00:30 UTC. Because we anticipate having relatively few participants for 
the scheduled sessions located in the part of the world between Europe 
and China, this schedule aims to give the most participants an 
opportunity to experience “night time” -- albeit abbreviated -- even if 
they wish to participate in the meeting multiple days in a row. We 
consulted with the chairs of the listed sessions when we were crafting 
this agenda to check if they thought that many of their expected 
participants would be disadvantaged by the slots chosen. They thought 
these slots were workable.

We are preparing for an increased volume of virtual interim meetings in 
April and beyond. We will share more information about strategies for 
avoiding conflicts and ensuring fairness in scheduling of virtual 
interims next week. Until then, we would like to ask chairs to refrain 
from scheduling virtual interims.

We understand that the agenda above is far from ideal. We know that some 
people reserved a whole week for IETF work and that week will now appear 
empty, and we know that working late into the night, working overnight, 
or getting up very early will be unpleasant or infeasible for some. We 
understand that when people join meetings from home, other commitments 
may interfere. We know there are many in our community with novel ideas 
about how to run virtual meetings, and these should be explored further. 
With the agenda above, we did the best we could given the rapidly 
changing conditions. We do not expect any of the decisions we made for 
this meeting to set a precedent for future meetings.

It was very evident to the IESG in the course of developing this agenda 
that we lack consensus-based community recommendations about how to deal 
with the inherent difficulties of scheduling virtual meetings given time 
zone differences. After IETF 107, we will figure out the best way to 
work with those interested in the community on this topic, perhaps via 
the manycouches mailing list, GENDISPATCH, a BOF, or other ways.

Feel free to send questions and comments to [email-masked]. We may not be 
able to respond immediately since we are busier than usual at the moment 
as we prepare for the virtual meeting and the seating of the new IESG 
members.

Regards,
The IESG

-- 

Loa Andersson                        email: [email-masked]
Senior MPLS Expert
Bronze Dragon Consulting             phone: +46 739 81 21 64