Subject: draft minutes of Open Area Meeting

From: April Marine <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 10:34:34 -0800 (PST)

Should have titled the previous one "USWG meeting".

April

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                            Minutes of the
		   User Services Open Area Meeting
                   IETF - Minneapolis, MN - March 1999

Recorded by April Marine. 

The User Services Area held its first open area meeting in
Minneapolis.  This was an experiment to see whether having such a
meeting would cause people who were somewhat curious about the Area to
attend and, if so, to elicit their points of view as new people on USV
topics.

The experiment worked to a limited degree.  It did attract some new
people, but as a whole it was sparsely attended.  The "regulars" in
the USV area know that the USWG working group, which always meets on
Monday, acts as the umbrella overview group for the area.  However, it
is difficult to conclude whether the limited attendance was due to
limited interest or competition with the other meetings.

The meeting started with April Marine, the USV Area Director, giving
an overview of the Area, its goals and current activities.  Goals of
the USV can be found on its web page, which is linked to from the IETF
Working Group web pages at http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/wg-dir.html.
In a nutshell, the USV:
          
 	- provides an international forum for people interested in all
          levels of users services
	- identified methods to improve the quality of information
          available to Internet users
	- initiates projects designed to assist individuals and
          organizations that support Internet users, and
	- maintains the FYI subseries of RFCs

She then provided an look at what the current working groups and BOFs
are, and what the relevant drafts were.  The chairs of the WEIRD and
FYIUP BOFs provided a quick introduction to what those meetings would
try to accomplish.

After that overview, the meeting was thrown open for discussion.  In
particular, feedback was requested on whether this type of activity
was what people expected, and what suggestions they might have for the
Area to address.

Some suggestions made were:

	- The area should represent the end-user perspective in
	  ongoing protocol development work.  This was an interesting
	  point because that is considered one of the goals of USV,
	  but was not captured in the goals statements!

	- The area should notice and document problems users are
	  having and provide feedback to the developers.  Some of the
	  examples given related more to user interface issues than
	  underlying protocols, such as how the function of many icons
	  is not intuitive and that icons can be difficult just to see
	  for some people.

	- The area could survey users to find what works and what
	  doesn't and what problems are common.  (presumably in a
	  certain topic area)

	- The area could collect "war stories" of mistakes and
	  document them.

	- The area could capture how IETF Working Groups interact.
	  (This falls under the WEIRD area, actually.)

	- The area could document privacy issues, such as use of
	  transparent proxies.  (The WREC working group has put
	  privacy issues out of scope for them.)

Some of these suggestions are a bit vague, which was interesting in
itself. The chair (AKA the Area Director) concluded that it looked
like the WEIRD group would address those items of initial concern that
are repeatedly mentioned.  Other working groups were addressing some
of the other points, so the WEIRD web pages that might provide some WG
overview would be useful.  The chair felt that the Area was not
overlooking any large holes, but that the meeting might not have had
enough people to conclude that totally.

The mailing list for comments on the User Services Area is
[email-masked] or send comments to the AD at [email-masked].

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From: Michael Sondow <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 01 Apr 1999 19:50:21 -0500

April Marine a écrit:

>           ongoing protocol development work.

I'll second that. I think the protocol developers would be surprised
to discover how many direct effects protocols have on the end-user,
and how useful to them feedback from end-users could be.

>           doesn't and what problems are common.

Easier said than done. Surveying users is an unrealized goal of many
organizations, including my own. The usual methods for attempting to
do so are admonished as "spam", and incur more negative feedback
than anything of practical value. Before soliciting the opinions of
users, the problem of adequate methods for accomplishing this needs
to be addressed.