Subject: WG Chairs Forum @ IETF 104

From: Karen O'Donoghue <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2019 02:48:51 +0000

Folks,

Below is a draft agenda for the WG Chairs Forum @ IETF 104. 
Please note that because of the unscheduled time experiment on Wednesday, this session has been moved to Tuesday. 
If there are any last minute agenda requests, please feel free to forward them. 

Regards,
Karen

WG Chair Forum @ IETF 104
Room:  Grand Ballroom
Tue 26 March 2019:  12:35 - 13:35
==================================

1. Welcome, Note Well, Administrivia
2. WG Chair Training Design Team initial report (Francesca Palombini, Tal Mizrahi) 
3. Agenda time experimentation
4. Open Mic

---

From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2019 12:32:10 +0900

This is a question. Is the "Agenda time experimentation" topic about the IESG's experiments such as Wednesday afternoon this meeting and Friday last meeting? If so, will ADs be present that can take community input?

A comment was made in the thread on this list to the effect that such experimentation is important because the IESG's time is valuable. The IESG's time is indeed valuable. I would argue that the time of the other bazillion of us is also valuable. When the IESG decides to do it, they are acting for the benefit of the community. An important part of that consideration is in what specific way the proposed experiment benefits the community.

My personal belief is not that such experimentation is wrong; the issue is that the IETF community learns about it at the last minute and as a result can't organize to make use of it. Flying 1000 folks halfway around the world to have a meeting, deciding to take Wednesday afternoon off, and not telling anybody until a couple of weeks before the meeting means that the IESG has just wasted a fair bit of time that people spent money and organized themselves to use for meetings. If we want to do such experimentation, I would appreciate it if the IESG would discuss it with the community (not "announce it to the community") well in advance, and let the community take advantage of the experiment.

My two yen.

> On Mar 15, 2019, at 11:48 AM, Karen O'Donoghue <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> Folks,
> 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Victorious warriors win first and then go to war,
Defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.
     Sun Tzu

---

From: "Adrian Farrel" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2019 08:48:33 -0000

This is not Karen's fault, but ...  :-)

I hope that the feedback and discussion on item 3 in the meeting will not be
taken as a definitive collective opinion of the WG chairs.

Somewhat ironically, this meeting is moved to Tuesday because of the
experiment that is running on Wednesday. As a result, it clashes with all of
those other regular meetings that have been specifically programmed for
Tuesday lunch partly in order to avoid clashing with the WG Chairs' Forum.
Thus, a number of chairs who are affected by the experiment will not be
present to comment on the experiment.

Of course, a solution would be to use the open agenda time on Wednesday
afternoon to hold this meeting. Those claiming that that would defeat the
purpose of the experiment might note that in the normal course of affairs
the Wednesday lunchtime slot was available as unstructured time during which
people could meet to do IETF work, but which was absorbed (for WG chairs) by
the Forum.

Cheers,
Adrian

-----Original Message-----
From: WGChairs <[email-masked]> On Behalf Of Karen O'Donoghue
Sent: 15 March 2019 02:49
To: [email-masked]
Subject: WG Chairs Forum @ IETF 104

Folks,

Below is a draft agenda for the WG Chairs Forum @ IETF 104. 
Please note that because of the unscheduled time experiment on Wednesday,
this session has been moved to Tuesday. 
If there are any last minute agenda requests, please feel free to forward
them. 

Regards,
Karen

1. Welcome, Note Well, Administrivia
2. WG Chair Training Design Team initial report (Francesca Palombini, Tal
Mizrahi) 
3. Agenda time experimentation
4. Open Mic

---

From: Stewart Bryant <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2019 09:04:22 +0000

I agree with the comments that both Fred and Adrian have made.

Perhaps the right thing is to use the free time on Wed PM (which looks 
more like a late lunch) between 1 and 3 to hold a BOF on the experiment?

That might mean that the open mic at the plenary concludes earlier.

- Stewart

---

From: "MORTON, ALFRED C (AL)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2019 12:37:41 +0000

Hi all,

For me, notice of the Tuesday WG Chairs' Forum arrived
in plenty of time for me to re-arrange my time.
Also, there are plenty of Side meetings now scheduled
to use the collaboration time on Wednesday.

IOW, the barn door was opened, and the horses are out of sight.

See you at the plenary, :-)
Al

> From: WGChairs [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Stewart
> Bryant
> Sent: Friday, March 15, 2019 5:04 AM
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: WG Chairs Forum @ IETF 104
>

---

From: Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2019 09:07:01 -0500

Hi, Fred,

On Thu, Mar 14, 2019 at 10:32 PM Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
wrote:

> This is a question. Is the "Agenda time experimentation" topic about the
> IESG's experiments such as Wednesday afternoon this meeting and Friday last
> meeting? If so, will ADs be present that can take community input?
>

I'll be in a parallel meeting, but I'd bet more than one AD who is
continuing after IETF 104 will be present - we usually have 1/3 to 1/2 the
IESG present, in my experience. As alluded further down the thread, it
seems that the smarter ADs would try to be present, so they know what's
coming up at plenary on Wednesday night.

But what I really wanted to reply to, was

>
> A comment was made in the thread on this list to the effect that such
> experimentation is important because the IESG's time is valuable.

I hope this was either a typo or a misspeak on someone's part - I've never
been involved in a discussion about unstructured time that even mentioned
whether it was useful, or not, to the IESG, and that dates back to roughly
Buenos Aires. It's always been about whether would be useful to the IETF.

I've typed "IETF" and "IESG" so often in the past six years that I could
have substituted one for the other - I'm sure I have, at least once - but
that's not what multiple IESGs have been talking about, anywhere that I've
been listening.

We try to do the right thing. Sometimes, we don't, but I can't imagine any
IESG I've served on thinking that the meeting week structure should be
optimized for them.

See you (and many others) in Prague.

Spencer, who is stepping down in less than a couple of weeks.

> The IESG's time is indeed valuable. I would argue that the time of the
> other bazillion of us is also valuable. When the IESG decides to do it,
> they are acting for the benefit of the community. An important part of that
> consideration is in what specific way the proposed experiment benefits the
> community.
>
> My personal belief is not that such experimentation is wrong; the issue is
> that the IETF community learns about it at the last minute and as a result
> can't organize to make use of it. Flying 1000 folks halfway around the
> world to have a meeting, deciding to take Wednesday afternoon off, and not
> telling anybody until a couple of weeks before the meeting means that the
> IESG has just wasted a fair bit of time that people spent money and
> organized themselves to use for meetings. If we want to do such
> experimentation, I would appreciate it if the IESG would discuss it with
> the community (not "announce it to the community") well in advance, and let
> the community take advantage of the experiment.
>
> My two yen.
>
> > Please note that because of the unscheduled time experiment on
> Wednesday, this session has been moved to Tuesday.

---

From: Bob Hinden <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2019 11:34:27 -0700

Fred,

> On Mar 14, 2019, at 8:32 PM, Fred Baker <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 

I agree with your two yen.   The move conflicted with another lunch meeting I have on Tuesday, this is, clearly not Karen’s fault.

If the IESG wants to do experiments with the agenda, then the experiment should be announced very early along with how the results will be measured.   Then after the meeting they should announce the results of the experiment and what the next steps are.   We had the “Friday” experiment in Bangkok, but I don’t remember seeing anything from the IESG on what was learned.  Did I miss it?   Now we have the “Wednesday” experiment.

Bob

---

From: Benjamin Kaduk <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2019 13:07:19 -0500

> If the IESG wants to do experiments with the agenda, then the experiment should be announced very early along with how the results will be measured.   Then after the meeting they should announce th…

Alissa's note after IETF 103 to look forward towards IETF 104
(https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf-announce/H64AuTYhxsGqM1a8BfTkszCZyso)
noted that we had received feedback about the experiment and wanted more.
I don't remember offhand what happened about summarizing that feedback;
hopefully one of my colleagues can chime in here.

It also noted that we would "Likely experiment with having some
unstructured time on the agenda during the meeting week".  Were you
expecting more data flow to the community about such experiments prior to
the publication of a draft agenda?  Is it specifically important to know
*when* the unstructured time would be in the week vs. that it will exist?
(If so, how far in advance?)

I hope that you can sympathize that a big factor in the decision about
whether or not to have unstructured time (and when!) is the size and nature
of the requests for normal structured time on the agenda -- there's only so
much time to go around!

Thanks,

Benjamin

---

From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2019 14:38:20 -0700

Speaking for myself...

Yes. Under what circumstances would you imagine it would not be important? If there is an expectation that part of the week would be scheduled for people to be creative with, how do they get creative without advice of the option?

One example, and this is just an example, is that in Prague a group from Africa wants to have a meeting about promoting Internet and IETF development in Africa. This is a good thing, and would have been a wonderful use of open time if the information had been available. It was instead scheduled conflicting with OPSEC on Monday morning. You would have to ask the organizers why that was better than conflicting with lunch on Monday, but I should think that, had they known, Wednesday afternoon would have been a perfect time.

On my calendar this week, I have four different examples of unfortunate scheduling that could conceivably have used Wednesday, or known that the Friday experiment wasn’t continuing and scheduled accordingly, and didn’t.

You’re asking whether the IESG should talk with the community or shoot from the hip hoping for the best, as it did this time. IMHO, which is simply my opinion, talking with the community will always be the better option.

> On Mar 20, 2019, at 11:07 AM, Benjamin Kaduk <[email-masked]> wrote:
>

---

From: Mark Nottingham <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2019 11:31:38 +1100

I have the opposite problem; I'm quadruple-booked on the Wednesday slot, because so many different folks have taken advantage of it.

> On 21 Mar 2019, at 8:38 am, Fred Baker <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> Speaking for myself...
> 

--
Mark Nottingham   https://www.mnot.net/

---

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2019 08:51:58 +0100

Would it not help if we would have tooling where :

a) non-WG/BOF meetings can be put into the system, for example  folks
   wanting a meeting look for a "sponsoring" guy who knows enough about
   IETF process (chair, IAB, AD), to pick up the meeting as sponsor -
   and enters it into system.

b) All attendees are allowed to create a personal schedule where they
   list the meetings threy want to attend, assign priorities to them
   (e.g.: 3 = MUST  attend, 2 = SHOULD attend, 3 = MAY attend). Prio 3
   must be given to less than a max amount of hours (TBD by scheduling
   tooling team).

c) Existing conflict resolution schemes are merged into b), aka: WG
   chairs, AD etc. just automatically get a 4 assigned to their
   sessions, the rest they have to enter via 3/2/1 as everybody else.

With a)-c), i would hope that automateach scheduling search can find the
best solutions, but even more so, also create the output explaining
why/how the resulting schedule is the best compromise.

I know i am a sore believer in technology *sigh*

On Thu, Mar 21, 2019 at 11:31:38AM +1100, Mark Nottingham wrote:
> > On my calendar this week, I have four different examples of unfortunate scheduling that could conceivably have used Wednesday, or known that the Friday experiment wasn???t continuing and scheduled accordingly, and didn???t.
> > 
> > You???re asking whether the IESG should talk with the community or shoot from the hip hoping for the best, as it did this time. IMHO, which is simply my opinion, talking with the community will always be the better option.
> > 

-- 
---
[email-masked]

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2019 08:02:18 -0400

> must be given to less than a max amount of hours (TBD by scheduling

This would be great, but the problem is already unsolveable *without*
(b). Adding (b) won't really result in a better solution, only removing
working group scheduling requests, and/or having fewer parallel slots
(and more slots) will help.

    > why/how the resulting schedule is the best compromise.

Having work on the system, I can tell you that the problem is too constrained
for an automated system to help.

--
]               Never tell me the odds!                 | ipv6 mesh networks [
]   Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works        |    IoT architect   [
]     [email-masked]  http://www.sandelman.ca/        |   ruby on rails    [

---

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2019 17:44:16 +0100

> (and more slots) will help.

But creates more fairness and better visibility of the unavoidable pain.

> for an automated system to help.

Hmm. I only did this hmm. 1980 on apple 2 for my schools schedule, so
i've been out of the game for a while ;-)

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2019 10:30:10 -0700

One problem we keep seeing is that different people have different
thresholds for must-avoid conflicts, ranging from “I’m chairing both” to
“I’m curious about these and would like to sit in”. I think any survey of
this sort needs to be clear about criteria.

Melinda

---

From: Brian Haberman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2019 13:44:20 -0400

Hi Melinda,

> this sort needs to be clear about criteria.

Completely agree. I had to reel a few chairs in with their inflated
conflict lists when I was an AD.

Brian

>>>     > (e.g.: 3 = MUST  attend, 2 = SHOULD attend, 3 = MAY attend).. Prio 3

---

From: Gorry Fairhurst <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2019 18:02:23 +0000

On 21/03/2019, 17:44, Brian Haberman wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 21, 2019 at 5:44 PM Toerless Eckert<[email-masked]>  wrote:
>>
My 2c: We have certain speakers in each IETF meeting who need to try to 
progress/comment on a key document, and we also have chairs who 
evidently need to be in a room to chair, but sometimes then also need to 
be elsewhere to catch or coordinate with other WGs. People work in 
multiple areas - not always obvious. Unless you can tell me in the 
survey who actually will finally have useful and new comments at the Mic 
and who needs to hear them, I doubt a survey will show much helpful 
insight into scheduling problems, good luck!

Scheduling more slots that have less conflict would likely just help 
me.... but then I'm not maybe atypical?

Gorry

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2019 14:45:08 -0400

Melinda Shore <[email-masked]> wrote:
    > thresholds for must-avoid conflicts, ranging from “I’m chairing both”
    > to “I’m curious about these and would like to sit in”. I think any
    > survey of this sort needs
    > to be clear about criteria.

The current scheduling system provides four levels of conflict.

(I worked on this under contract to ISOC back in 2012, of course things might
have changed)
When Stephanie selects a WG session request is shows her all the places that
it can not go in red.

Level "0" conflicts are the list people who "must be there".
This is initialized to the list of chairs+secretary, and the responsible AD.
More can be added in the session request tool as I recall!

Then there are the three levels of conflicts entered by the chairs in their
session request.  Those levels can be supressed in the interface that
shows conflicts, so one can find a slot that works for level 1, but not
level 2/3 if one wants.

(I suppose different colours could have been used too.
It would be good to have a demo in a WG chairs lunch.
I could use the sandbox DT to show it to you if you want)

The people who-must-be-there list could be extended to include WG document
authors.  This could be driven by the document simply being adopted,
or it could be additionally driven by documents on the WG agendas, but I
suspect that that information is not available at the time of session
management.  But, if we had that information, then it could apply to
individual drafts which were being considered in a WG.

It would probably be possible to do an analysis of the current schedule to
show how often we are screwing our active authors.

The DT has information about who has done area reviews of documents, so
we could perhaps also include those people too.

The DT has a button to track documents, one could go a third step to see how
many people who were "curious" enough to track the document were experiencing
conflicts.  I suspect that the track function is not used by very many yet,
but those who use it, use it alot.

--
Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>, Sandelman Software Works
 -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-

---

From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 2019 10:02:56 -0700

Thanks for this.

From my perspective, at least one of the chairs is required (both/all is better, but we can often get volunteers for support roles) and one of the authors on each draft in the agenda is required (again, all is better, but my requirement is to have a speaker in the front of the room).

One big issue is that I request a room 1-2 months before the event, but I post the agenda after the draft cut-off. I generally have a pretty good idea what the agenda will look like when I request the slot, but may we’ll add a draft at the last minute - or even accept one as AOB after the deadline.

I have cases of each of these at IETF 104; my co-chair will be in another room, we have a late-breaking draft, and we have an after-deadline request for a review of an opsec draft that we’re taking as AOB - “time available”.

What might make more sense to me would be a way for a person, or a chair proxying for a person, to say they need to be in a given meeting. That would allow a speaker to add themselves to the meeting “need to be there” list.

Sent using a machine that autocorrects in interesting ways...

> On Mar 21, 2019, at 11:45 AM, Michael Richardson <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
>

---

From: Benjamin Kaduk <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 23 Mar 2019 07:42:44 -0500

>    and enters it into system.

Did you see https://www7.ietf.org/how/meetings/104/side-meetings/ that has
an ical export for the side meetings listed in the corresponding wiki page?

-Ben

---

From: Benjamin Kaduk <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 23 Mar 2019 07:46:49 -0500

> Yes. Under what circumstances would you imagine it would not be important? If there is an expectation that part of the week would be scheduled for people to be creative with, how do they get creati…

I guess I was unclear; the question is how far in advance it is needed --
obviously it is needed at least before the meeting week itself!
Specifically, is it needed before the draft agenda for sessions is
available, e.g., if one needed to book an external venue for a particular
event.

For myself, I will not know what my schedule looks like for the week until
the draft agenda is available, and I basically don't even try to start
scheduling until after that information is available; perhaps I am in the
minority.

> One example, and this is just an example, is that in Prague a group from Africa wants to have a meeting about promoting Internet and IETF development in Africa. This is a good thing, and would have…

In this example, when was the meeting actually scheduled?

> You’re asking whether the IESG should talk with the community or shoot from the hip hoping for the best, as it did this time. IMHO, which is simply my opinion, talking with the community will alway…

No, I'm asking whether the scheduling of unstructured time is sufficiently
privileged that it needs priority over the scheduling of structured time.
(And no, I don't claim to already know the answer to that question.)

-Ben

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 23 Mar 2019 17:02:49 +0100

Benjamin Kaduk <[email-masked]> wrote:
    > I guess I was unclear; the question is how far in advance it is needed
    > -- obviously it is needed at least before the meeting week itself!

In the case of Bangkok, I think that the community heard about the Friday
experiment and the IEEE co-location relatively late.  I generally book
flights 8 to 10 weeks in advance; I would book even earlier in if I can.
I am mostly limited by coordination with my family.

{I left at noon on Friday from Bangkok not because the day was empty (I didn't
know when I booked), but because of the booking rules meant that leaving any
later meant getting home on *Monday* with very long layovers. I could have
avoided that only by booking expensive one-way tickets rather than Y-tickets}

In the case of Prague, we did not find out about the Wednesday-experiment
until the draft agenda came out.

Clearly the secretariat and the IESG knew at least a week beforehand. :-)
I had guessed from comments I heard in Bangkok that we'd probably try such a
thing (and mentioned in some planning emails), but I had no official
confirmation.

I would like to know the shape of these experiments, even if the final details
are vague, at the previous IETF plenary.
(I think that Wednesday-experiment is a going to be a good thing)

    > No, I'm asking whether the scheduling of unstructured time is
    > sufficiently privileged that it needs priority over the scheduling of
    > structured time.  (And no, I don't claim to already know the answer to
    > that question.)

I am not entirely sure that I understand your question here.
I don't know what "privileged" means here.  I think it means important,
rather than it has to be done by the IESG? ("sudo -u iesg rm -f /wednesday")

Maybe you can explain what it would mean for the yes and no case?

---

From: Benjamin Kaduk <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 23 Mar 2019 11:13:06 -0500

> rather than it has to be done by the IESG? ("sudo -u iesg rm -f /wednesday")

Perhaps you have already answered the question I was trying to ask, in your
message above.

IIUC, you want the presence of any deviation from baseline to be known
"well in advance" (you say at the prior meeting's plenary; I might counter
with 2+ months in advance, but in any case, clearly before the agenda for
structured time is known.  That is, the IESG would commit to scheduling
some unstructured time, for this example.  So that would be a "yes" to the
question I was trying to ask -- you want to know about the presence of
unstructured time before the details of the structured time are known.
I guess there is a related question about whether you need to know what
day/time the unstructured time will be "well in advance" as well, but that
seems compatively minor given that committing to the existence of
unstructured time will still be committing to a constraint on the agenda,
and the details of that would not affect how much time we have for
structured WG sessions to any large extent.

> Maybe you can explain what it would mean for the yes and no case?

It means important, as you guessed; thanks for trying to pick out my
meaning.  Basically, that committing to providing unstructured time would
take priority over providing structured time for WG sessions, so that the
presence of the former would be decided before the needs/requests for WG
time are known.

-Ben

---

From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 23 Mar 2019 18:16:47 +0100

> On Mar 23, 2019, at 1:46 PM, Benjamin Kaduk <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 

Ditto here.

> In this example, when was the meeting actually scheduled?

I have no idea. I know I was invited to it on March 18 (Monday). They were also talking about moving the meeting to conflict with lunch instead of an IETF meeting, so it seems unlikely that it was set up the day I was invited - they would have done that before inviting me.

---

From: Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 23 Mar 2019 22:21:39 +0100

All problems have obvious solutions to ADs who are stepping down, but ...

> are vague, at the previous IETF plenary.

ISTM that it's becoming more obvious that the IESG and the working group
chairs need to talk more often than once every four months during open mike
time at plenary.

In this case (among other things), we asked questions on the post-IETF 103
survey that informed our discussion about what to do at IETF 104, so we
didn't know the plan at the previous plenary. But we did know the plan, at
some level, before the IETF 104 draft agenda was published.

I note that the average telechat length has shortened considerably during
the past couple of IESGs, for both formal and informal telechats. Maybe
this is an opportunity to add a (pulling the specifics out of thin air)
one-hour open mike session to one informal telechat each month, where
people could call in, be told minor(!) details like "OBTW, we're planning
to experiment with an unstructured time block on Wednesday", and provide
feedback when it could actually influence decisions.

(I'm happy to be proved wrong, but I'm pretty sure that chunking the draft
schedule after we started getting feedback, redoing all the conflicts
lists, and having the Secretariat produce a new schedule was physically
impossible. But that doesn't mean we couldn't have handled this better some
other way)

Or maybe something else is a better idea. But if I learned anything after
my divorce, I learned that "communication is a good thing"!

Spencer

---

From: "Aaron Falk" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 23 Mar 2019 22:23:37 +0100

On 23 Mar 2019, at 22:21, Spencer Dawkins at IETF wrote:

> Maybe this is an opportunity to add a (pulling the specifics out of 
> thin air) one-hour open mike session to one informal telechat each 
> month, where people could call in, be told minor(!) details like 
> "OBTW, we're planning to experiment with an unstructured time block on 
> Wednesday", and provide feedback when it could actually influence 
> decisions.

I like this idea esp. if condensed notes could be sent to wgchairs@.

--aaron

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2019 02:25:12 +0100

Benjamin Kaduk <[email-masked]> wrote:
    > "well in advance" (you say at the prior meeting's plenary; I might
    > counter with 2+ months in advance, but in any case, clearly before the
    > agenda for structured time is known.  That is, the IESG would commit to
    > scheduling some unstructured time, for this example.  So that would be
    > a "yes" to the question I was trying to ask -- you want to know about
    > the presence of unstructured time before the details of the structured
    > time are known.

Yes, I think I'd go further and say that knowing about the unstructured time
would be best known before the session request cut-off date, ideally in
enough time to allow chairs and WG to think about things.

Probably we need to run the experiment a few times before it sinks in
that we don't need to everything during the session, and perhaps participants
also need to think that their time commitment (and travel and
extracurriculary arrangements) is not just to the 1-2 hr WG session.

    > I guess there is a related question about whether you
    > need to know what day/time the unstructured time will be "well in
    > advance" as well, but that seems compatively minor given that
    > committing to the existence of unstructured time will still be
    > committing to a constraint on the agenda, and the details of that would
    > not affect how much time we have for structured WG sessions to any
    > large extent.

I agree that we probably don't need to know which day, but I think that
knowing that it's not Friday is probably important.

    > meaning.  Basically, that committing to providing unstructured time
    > would take priority over providing structured time for WG sessions, so
    > that the presence of the former would be decided before the
    > needs/requests for WG time are known.

Got it.
Then yes.

---

From: "Salz, Rich" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2019 06:19:58 +0000

Yes, even if it's "we're planning on doing this, not sure of details yet."

---

From: Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2019 07:26:13 +0100

On one point ...

> knowing that it's not Friday is probably important.

I'm stepping down on Wednesday night, but if there is a single person on
the IESG who thinks that unstructured time on Friday could ever possibly be
a good idea, they have hidden that error well :-)

Beyond the current and future IESG, I don't think I've talked to anyone in
the community who was happy enough with unstructured time on Friday to ask
that we do that again. So I think we can all take this off the table.

Spencer

---

From: Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2019 07:37:19 +0100

Hi, Rich,

> Yes, even if it's "we're planning on doing this, not sure of details yet."

ISTM that you and I are saying two complimentary things in this thread:

   - Early warning is a good thing, even if the details aren't known
   - Figuring out how to talk about details with the working group chairs
   before decisions are made is a good thing, too

 I know the current IESG is fairly sure at some level that we let people
know we were thinking about doing non-Friday unstructured time, but there's
been kind of a scramble to chase down where we might have said that out
loud, where working group chairs might have seen it. I believe the
canonical answer is "it was in Alissa's post-IETF 103 blog", but figuring
out where we said this, and when, was more of a challenge than it should
have been.

So, figuring out how the IESG and working group chairs can talk more than
once every four months, with some expectation that many working group
chairs would be aware of what was said, seems pretty important to me.

Spencer

---

From: "Salz, Rich" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2019 07:46:03 +0000

>ISTM that you and I are saying two complimentary things in this thread:

Seems that way.  Nice summary.

>So, figuring out how the IESG and working group chairs can talk more than once every four months, with some expectation that many working group chairs would be aware of what was said, seems pretty important to me.

Strong agreement. :)

---

From: Alissa Cooper <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2019 15:00:35 +0100

> On Mar 24, 2019, at 7:26 AM, Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> On one point ... 
> 
> On Sun, Mar 24, 2019 at 2:25 AM Michael Richardson <[email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
> 
> Benjamin Kaduk <[email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]>> wrote:
> I'm stepping down on Wednesday night, but if there is a single person on the IESG who thinks that unstructured time on Friday could ever possibly be a good idea, they have hidden that error well :-)

Well, in the version that involves canceling Friday and shortening the meeting week, I think it’s a good idea. That is how the idea started, but not what we ended up experimenting with, and it doesn’t seem like many people are interested in this.

Alissa

> 
> Beyond the current and future IESG, I don't think I've talked to anyone in the community who was happy enough with unstructured time on Friday to ask that we do that again. So I think we can all take this off the table. 
> 
> Spencer