Subject: Re: Agenda is still incomplete

From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 15:31:45 -0500

>>>>> "David" == David B Harrington <[email-masked]> writes:

    David> Hi, As a person whose job involved decding who was
    David> justified in attending such week-long meetings, recruiting
    David> personnel to get actively involved in standards
    David> organizations, and a long-time participant myself, I'd ike
    David> to play devil's advocate to your assertion.

    David> Why is it beneficial for a newcomer, who is focused on one
    David> and only one protocol effort, and who doesn't know anybody
    David> in the IETF to have umpteen hallways meetings with, to
    David> spend a whole week in an IETF meeting? To do so for their
    David> first IETF meeting generally does nothing except bombard
    David> them with information overload. After they've attended a
    David> few day-sessions and sampled some WGs other than those they
    David> are directly interested in, have built up some contacts,
    David> and begun to understand the Tao of the IETF and the
    David> Internet architectures, then it makes more sense for them
    David> to attend week-long meetings.

I found it very useful to attend a lot of different meetings my first
IETF.  I gained a broad understanding of what was going on in the IETF
both in the security and to some lesser extent in the applications
area.  It was useful to see how a variety of working groups ran
themselves.  IT was useful to view the BOFs from several areas.

--Sam

---

From: Stewart Bryant <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 21:52:58 +0000

Sam Hartman wrote:

<snip>

> themselves.  IT was useful to view the BOFs from several areas.

I agree. I had the same experience - twice. When I attended
nummber of IETFs in starting in 1990 and again when I
started attending IETF from early 2000 onwards.

- Stewart

---

From: Matt Mathis <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 2004 17:26:05 -0500 (EST)

There is another parameter that seems to have been overlooked in the schedule 
discussions:  define "attendee hour" to be the (expected) number of attendees 
times the total requested WG meeting time.  Clearly both the scheduling 
difficulty and the importance of getting it right scale by attendee hour.

The overall quality of the scheduling process can be helped by (loosely) 
ranking the WG's by attendee hours, and committing the WG meeting times in 
order from the largest to the smallest.

This could be implemented in several different ways, but easiest approach would 
be to have different (soft) deadlines by WG size.  So for example if you are 
expecting 1000 attendee hours, you really should have a committed slot by 4 
weeks out, 500, by 3 weeks, etc.  (I'm just guessing at the thresholds).

A more formal approach would be to actually compute the attendee hour ranking 
and let (require?) the WG chairs pick the slots in order, down the ranking 
(sort of like a football draft).  This also works as a hybrid: schedule the 
largest dozen WG's one-at-a-time starting before 4 weeks out, and then 
progressively shift to a less structured process for the smaller WG's.

I would also discourage "early binding" of small WG's.  I think I would allow 
them to request slots, but tag them as "requested" prior to the right time for 
their position in the size ranking.  It is critical that "in process" schedules 
get published, and that larger WG do not get bumped due to conflicts with 
smaller WGs.

It would be really interesting to compute and post the "attendee hours" for the 
current meeting.

One last thing: the "Friday problem" can be addressed by encouraging one of the 
larger (or the largest) WG to committing early to a Friday slot.  Even if 
nothing runs opposite them on Friday, they will take a lot of pressure off of 
the mid week.

Thanks,
--MM--
-------------------------------------------
Matt Mathis      http://www.psc.edu/~mathis
Work:412.268.3319    Home/Cell:412.654.7529
-------------------------------------------
Evil is defined by people who think they know
"The Truth" and use force to apply it to others.

---

From: "David B Harrington" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 2004 18:09:19 -0500

Hi,

Another approach would be to ask the registrants to indicate which WGs
they would like to attend (without knowing if the WGs were meeting).
Or the chairs could be required to request slots earlier, then
registrants could select which they would like to attend (without
knowing when).
Then a software program could create a conflict matrix to determine
how to reduce conficts for the greatest number of people.
The registration web page could also ask for (or otherwise determine)
relative priority of each WG for a person, to give greater weight to
AD, chair, editor, and presentors.
And once the schedule is done once, all the satisfactory assignments
can be locked, and any other requests can be scheduled around the
locked assignments.

That's one way it's done for school scheduling, once it is known which
students are interested in which courses, which teachers can teach the
course, when the teachers are available, and which rooms are available
to suit the class requirements.

David Harrington
[email-masked]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] 
> [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Matt Mathis
> Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 2004 5:26 PM
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: Attendee hours and the agenda
> 
> discussions:  define "attendee hour" to be the (expected) 
> number of attendees times the total requested WG meeting 
> time.  Clearly both the scheduling difficulty and the 
> importance of getting it right scale by attendee hour.
> 
> The overall quality of the scheduling process can be helped 
> by (loosely) ranking the WG's by attendee hours, and 
> committing the WG meeting times in order from the largest to 
> the smallest.
> 
> This could be implemented in several different ways, but 
> easiest approach would be to have different (soft) deadlines 
> by WG size.  So for example if you are expecting 1000 
> attendee hours, you really should have a committed slot by 4 
> A more formal approach would be to actually compute the 
> attendee hour ranking and let (require?) the WG chairs pick 
> the slots in order, down the ranking (sort of like a football 
> draft).  This also works as a hybrid: schedule the largest 
> dozen WG's one-at-a-time starting before 4 weeks out, and 
> then progressively shift to a less structured process for the 
> smaller WG's.
> 
> I would also discourage "early binding" of small WG's.  I 
> think I would allow them to request slots, but tag them as 
> "requested" prior to the right time for their position in the 
> size ranking.  It is critical that "in process" schedules get 
> published, and that larger WG do not get bumped due to 
> conflicts with smaller WGs.
> 
> It would be really interesting to compute and post the 
> "attendee hours" for the current meeting.
> 
> One last thing: the "Friday problem" can be addressed by 
> encouraging one of the larger (or the largest) WG to 
> committing early to a Friday slot.  Even if nothing runs 
> opposite them on Friday, they will take a lot of pressure off 
> of the mid week.
> 
> Thanks,
> --MM--
> Evil is defined by people who think they know "The Truth" and 
> use force to apply it to others.
> 
> 
>

---

From: Gorry Fairhurst <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Nov 2004 10:02:30 +0000

Hmmm....

"reduce conficts for the greatest number of people"

It sounds plausible, but in reality, the WGs do provide various 
functions, including, but not limited to:

	awareness of what is going on/being proposed
	review of existing/new work
	motivation to complete ID's etc

It's not quite that simple, authors/contributors have a key role, and 
this would need to be reflected in the formula - because if they aren't 
in the room, the WG meeting is much less valuable...

One other thing that I noticed was that the IETF-61 Agendas page is 
still rather sparse, that doesn't encourage people to stay for other 
meetings in the week...

http://www.ietf.org/meetings/wg_agenda_61.html

Gorry Fairhurst.

---

From: Thierry Ernst <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2004 17:23:44 +0900

> in the room, the WG meeting is much less valuable...

Although complex, this would be interesting, as many people always
complain that they cannot attend one WG because of their OWN conflicts.
Some active people in WG A may need to participate actively with WG B
whereas there is no link between WG A and WG B at the WG level.

> http://www.ietf.org/meetings/wg_agenda_61.html

Some WG (for instance NEMO) have sent their agenda before the deadline
but it's still not published there.

A problem I see with the current deadline with the agenda is that it is
and should be subject to changes up to the last minute.  Here too, a
tool would be useful for WG chairs to update the agenda.

Thierry.