Subject: RE: Agenda is still incomplete

From: Andy Bierman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 07:42:54 -0700

At 06:20 AM 10/29/2004, Lars-Erik Jonsson (LU/EAB) wrote:

Let's back up a second...
I shouldn't have jumped into the solution space in my
first mail.  

Here's the problem statement:

   A stable agenda is needed in advance of an IETF conference
   to allow participants who cannot reserve the entire
   week more time to make travel plans.  Currently, there is
   no deadline for the final agenda.  This practice is 
   exclusionary and discourages participation in the IETF.

Here's the goal:

   The final 'planned' agenda for an IETF meeting must
   be posted no later than 14 days before the start of the
   conference.  Scheduled meetings may be cancelled after this
   point, but not added, and may only be moved in exceptional 
   situations (decided on a case-by-case basis).

The first step is deciding if this problem is worth solving.

There seems to be genuine conflict between the desire to conserve
meeting slots and the desire to be accommodate participants
who find it difficult to block out an entire week for IETF
attendance.

Andy

>I'm not a big fan of rules that are stricter than they need to be.
>Of course we should encourage and simplify participation also for
>those who can not be present for the whole week, but on the other
>hand I do think we should have processes that encourage whole-week
>participation, as that stimulates cross-area involvement which is
>an important factor for a successful IETF. We should also stimulate
>"real-work" at our meetings, which means to use WG sessions for
>things that are hard to resolve on our main work channel, the WG
>mail list. I would not have a problem with moving the slot-request
>deadline earlier, a week or so, but I am not sure if that in itself
>would solve any problem(s). It may be a help, but let's not focus
>on that only.
>
>Some things I have observed when looking at how the agenda for this
>meeting evolved are:
>- First (?) agenda was published on IETF.org on Oct 5th. I do not
>  think that is at all a useful publication. It only included a
>  small subset of all WG's, and was clearly subject to changes.
>- Next revision of the agenda got out on Oct 28. What was going
>  on in the meantime? Scheduling is hard and Marcia is doing a
>  great job, but I do think we could all help to do better,
>  especially in figuring out what should be publicly announced.
>- I sent my slot request on Oct 10, which I personally think is
>  early as I did not at that time really know whether my WG would
>  have a need for it. Still, I was not able to answer people who
>  asked if/when we would meet, first on Oct 28 I could give a
>  preliminary answer to the "when"-question.  
>
>I think we should not publish the first preliminary agenda
>before we have a rather complete one, which people who have to use
>an agenda as a basis for travel planning could reasonably trust
>to be rather stable and almost complete. Before that, the agenda
>should be circulated in pre-versions on the WG-chairs list, where
>we would resolve most conflicts before we publish anything.
>
>This is not a simple problem, so let's not pretend it would. If
>all WG's would always meet, things would be simpler. Curious
>question to those who are addicted to statistics; do we have any
>information on how many WG's are not always meeting??? For a WG
>like AVT, making an early request is easy as they always (??) meet
>during two long slots, as Magnus pointed out. I guess there are
>also WGs that can handle almost all their issues on their mail
>list and thus "never" meet physically, making scheduling "easy".
>However, I would guess there are many WGs that do not match any
>of these extremes, and even AVT might end up there at one point
>(I recognize it was not that long ago when AVT actually discussed
>whether they needed to meet, right?).
>
>/L-E
>

---

From: Ólafur Guðmundsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 11:45:03 -0400

>    exclusionary and discourages participation in the IETF.

I agree but at the same time I think the reasoning is too narrowly
focused. I would like to see other issues mentioned in this problem
statement possibly including:
         ability to schedule external (as to the IETF) events during the
                 same week, I have to juggle Parent Teacher conferences
                 during this week due to the fact I'm "sleeping at home",
                 not to mention calls with customers.
         ability to schedule hall meetings for ad-hock design teams
                 or groups interested in one topic. I have two of these
                 to work out one with 15+ people and the other with about 10.
         Figure out deadline to get hold of AD before WG meeting to go over
                 new charter.
Before the schedule comes out it is impossible to do any of this.

>The first step is deciding if this problem is worth solving.

Yes it is.
But I would like it to be 21 days rather than 14, knowing the deadline
will slip, 14 days actual lead time is important in getting reasonable
airfare, and 14 days before for secretariat is 13 days before, in some time
zones, and by the time they can act on it 10 days before they need
board the airplane :-)

         Olafur