Subject: Jabber meetings to accelerate WG progress

From: Barry Leiba <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2006 12:00:26 -0400

The DKIM working group started an experiment in April, and it's proved
successful enough for us that I'd like to spread the idea around:
In order to accelerate progress on issue-resolution, Stephen Farrell
and I decided to try having jabber meetings.

Here's what we did:

We chose a date and time for the meeting, trying to pick something that
was reasonably acceptable to most of the principal participants.  That
was a little easier for us, since we have no active Asian participants,
so we chose a time that's at the end of the day in Europe and early in
the morning in California.  We stuck with that time for subsequent
meetings, but with a different mix of participants we would have
shifted the time in order to rotate the "ickiness" around (and see
below for more comment about time).

We defined the meeting to be an hour long, and set a specific agenda
for it.  For our first meeting we chose one or two issues that were
under debate on the mailing list and that we thought wouldn't have
feathers flying too wildly as we discussed them.  We got more ambitious
as time (and success) went on.

We used the IETF jabber room, [email-masked], which is available
throughout, not just during IETF meetings.  We did check with the IETF
support folks to make sure no outage was planned (or, well, unplanned)
for the time we'd chosen.  They cooperated with us in being available
to correct problems (and we actually did have one the first time).

We posted the date and time to the mailing list, so people could plan
to attend.  We posted the planned discussion topics to the list also,
though not early enough (see discussion below).

We made it clear that anything "decided" in the jabber meeting would be
ratified on the mailing list.  We posted a summary of the meeting,
along with a pointer to the jabber logs, to the mailing list after the
meeting.

Before we did any of this apart from planning, we passed it by our ADs,
who passed it by the IESG.  There was some skepticism that it fit into
IETF rules (is it an interim meeting, a teleconference, a design team,
or something else entirely?), and some skepticism about whether it'd
work.  But they approved it, and we went ahead.

Here's what happened:

We found it to be extremely successful!  After the first one got a
couple of issues resolved much more quickly and clearly than had been
happening on the mailing list, we scheduled another in about a month.
For a few weeks leading up to a WGLC on our base protocol spec we
scheduled them weekly in order to get through the open-issues list.
Participation was good, though not everyone could make it all the time,
and a couple of "decided" issues were kept open on the mailing list --
but even for those, progress had been made because we'd cleared up some
points in the jabber discussion.

While we feared that it'd be hard to moderate the jabber discussion,
the participants cooperated to make it easy and very productive.  The
immediate responses to comments allowed us to understand each other's
points more quickly than with delayed email responses.  Further, the
requirement to be concise in a jabber chat helped too, avoiding
long-winded comments and getting to the point more clearly.  People
who'd been arguing without completely understanding each other were
able to come to agreement.

Here were some of the jagged rocks:

It can be difficult to find a time that works for everyone.  As I said,
not having Asian participants helped in that regard.  Still, we believe
that people are willing to occasionally get up early or stay up late in
order to make progress, and not everyone has to be on the chat every
time either -- the mailing list is still the final stop for the issues.
We did have complaints from a couple of participants that it wasn't
convenient for them, but I think they did not ultimately feel
disenfranchised by what we did.  They just sorta felt like they missed
out a bit.

With a less cooperative group it might be harder to keep it under
control.  In our case, the participants were truly wonderful about it!

It's easy for the meeting time to creep up on even a conscientious WG
chair, and I'm afraid that Stephen and I did not get the agendas to the
mailing list soon enough (and once it was even unclear whether we were
cancelling it for lack of an agenda).  It worked anyway, but in future
we need to be diligent about getting the agenda posted a couple of days
in advance, at least, especially if we're doing it monthly (when it was
weekly, and the agenda was "the issues list", that was somewhat less
important, though people were still asking that we post agendae).

In the end, Stephen and I are sure that we got the issues worked
through, corrected, and closed much more quickly for having done this,
and that the working group and its product is better for it.  And it's
*way* better than trying to have an interim meeting that people have to
travel to (though those are helpful in other ways).

This won't work for every WG, but it's certainly something worth trying.
Comments?  Questions?

Barry

--
Barry Leiba, DKIM working group co-chair  ([email-masked])
http://www.research.ibm.com/people/l/leiba
http://www.research.ibm.com/spam