Subject: [Webtransport] WEBTRANS Virtual Meeting on March 27, 2020

From: Bernard Aboba <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 2020 12:36:43 -0700

As you probably know, WEBTRANS will not be meeting at IETF 107 on March
23.  Instead, as noted by the IESG in the message below, WEBTRANS WG will
have a virtual meeting on Friday, March 27 from 22:10 - 00:10 (UTC).  This
corresponds to 15:10 - 17:10 Pacific Time.

More on meeting parameters will be forthcoming.  In the meantime, please
send any requests for agenda time to [email-masked].

Bernard
For the Chairs
________________________________________
From: 107all <[email-masked]> on behalf of The IESG <[email-masked]>
Sent: Thursday, March 12, 2020 11:34 AM
To: IETF Announcement List
Cc: [email-masked]; [email-masked]; [email-masked]
Subject: [EXTERNAL] [107all] IETF 107 Virtual Meeting Agenda

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://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ietf.org%2Fhow%2Fmeetings%2Fregister%2F&amp;data=02%7C01%7CBernard.Aboba%40microsoft.com%7C19e12a8347eb4f64579a08d7c6b66547%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C0%7C637196359005883721&amp;sdata=kQfAgWbmmCw4EekDfNZsflv834VNP7co5U7L9RhVaEc%3D&amp;reserved=0
>.

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