| Internet Engineering Task Force | J.P.J. Jaeggli |
| Internet-Draft | Zynga |
| Intended status: Informational | October 2012 |
| Expires: April 02, 2013 |
Observations on the experience and nature of Large Interim Meetings
draft-jaeggli-interim-observations-01
Planning, particpipation and conclusions from the experience of participating in the IETF LIM activity on september 29th 2012.
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The genesis of this draft was the experience of planning and participating in the so called IETF LIM (Large Interim Meeting) held adjacent to the fall RIPE meeting on the 29th of September 2012. Three working groups met, OPSEC, V6OPS and SIDR. It is intended that the draft cover plannning, at the meeting, and an attempt at some conclusions based on the experience.
The fact that the draft represents the vantage point of a single person at this time necessarily limits the scope of the draft and undoubtedly as result some key elements of the planning and motivation will be missed. The Large Interim Meeting is the product of efforts over a number of years by multiple parties including the ISOC Board, IETF management (Chair, IESG, IAB, IAOC, IAD) working group chairs and probably others. To the extent that this draft can be made better through the input of others I would invite contributions and criticism.
The LIM was the attempt that I am aware of an interim meeting scheduled by IETF management for the purposes of accumulating interim meetings in a common location rather that scheduled by working-group participants, chairs nad coordinating ADs. It is not the first attempt at such a meeting. It's status therefore an experiment is worth bearing mind in understanding the rest of the text.
The LIM was scheduled to coencide with the end of RIPE 65 and Occured on Saturday Sept 29th 2012. Ripe 65 was at the Hotel Okura Amseterdam from September 24th-28th. It is my understanding that coordination with the RIPE program committee occured only After IETF 84 (an IAB member meber also happens toserve on the RIPE program committee)
It is, my understanding that discussion of the possbility of a LIM style meeting occured early2011 if not before. The v6ops chairs were asked at various times to consider particpation in such a meeting in other potential locations. The discsussion related to this interim meeting commenced in June. The stated rational for targeting v6ops involvement in a large interim was the volume of work that we process during and between meetings.
Some questions existed in the planning phase as to the nature of the logisitical support provided by the secretatit for the meeting as well as, remote participation, and the actual timinng of the meeting. Unlike a traditional interim the responsibility for satisfying these details was for better or worse in the hands of the secretariat, which meant a reduced workload for the chairs but it also left some details undecided until they could be announced, a hotel contract for the meeting rooms wasn't completed until after the 4 week window for announcing and interim meeting had passed
A show of hands and subsequent mailing list followup were done to gauge v6ops interest in participation in an interim meeting. Roughly 50 participants, mostly active ones indicated significant interest in an interim collocated with RIPE 65 which we deemed sufficient to proceed. Superficially only a fraction of the v6ops attendees are represented by the interested segment however when the numbers are mapped against active participants and draft authors, interested participants in the interim represent a bigger purportion of that group
Two of the three scheduled meetings were given 4 hour windows, the third SIDR (which routinely has interim meetings) had effectivetly the entire day.
Immediately after IETF 84 the working group chairs of v6ops proposed an interim draft deadline 2 weeks out from the interim meeting (Saturday the 15th). This was to be the basis for the acceptance of revised or new drafts onto the agenda.
Two OPS area working groups met, OPSEC and V6OPS, Effectively one after the other albiet seperated by lunch.
Both meetings that I participated in came in substantially below their alloted time. V6OPS was allocated 4 hours and completed in two. SIDR broke for lunch, returned, and finished early however it used a substantially higher percentage of the allocated time. Possibly because it was a Saturday remote participation was effectively non-existant
Remote participation was supported by volunteers from meetecho using their own application. Hotel okura wireless infrastrucuture was used to support the meeting. An outage of the hotel network was observed during the opsec meeting with the result that remote participation would have been interupted for about 10 minutes had there been any to speak of.
Interim Meeting registration ended up being about 40 participants, 2 days prior to the meeting that number was 23, provisions had been made for around 100 attendees.
Despite my personal misgivings with V6OPS as patient zero for the large interim meeting concept, Once committed we endeavored to make the meeting work for the participants that took the time out of their weekend to attend, or as was my case, traveled specifically for the Interim meeting. As an experiment I think a lot of things are worth doing once and I hope that some lessons can be derived from the experience that have value for future interims.
One osbervation that I would make about the interim submission deadline (and it's relative failure) is that it appears that authors who are not planning to attend a meeting are less inclined to revise a document in support a meeting they are not attending. The corollary is a that authors planning on a attending a meeting will rev their documents, or possibly that a revised document is justification to attend.
This particular conjunction was proposed several months prior to coordination with the RIPE program committee, given that the RIPE meeting traditionally ends on Friday with Lunch it is possible that tighter coordination with the RIPE organization could have coupled the event more directly. RIPE is long like an IETF meeting and if the goal of a conjoint interim is evangelism cross pollination or outreach (is it?) then fitting more directly into the program would probably have better results. As it is the bulk of the attendees in OPSEC and v6ops were there to attend RIPE as well or attended RIPE and stayed for the interim.
V6ops attendance at an IETF meeting is typically in excess of 200 attendees. An interim meeting that attracts 25 of those and minuscule remote participation is necessarily exclusionary by default if not deliberately. If useful work that advances drafts, gets done, is that exclusivity a bad thing? It's not useful for measuring meaningful consensus.
The history of interim meetings has illustrative examples of working groups or design teams, with numerus interim meetings (IP storage/NFSv4, Lemonade, 6lowpan, Behave SIDR etc) that demonstrate the utility of frequent physical or virtual interims. It is possible that there are properties that make some working groups more effective at utilizing interims than others.
Area director's were rather well represent at the LIM, While the attendance of both of our Directors was appreciated I'm not sure that it's a good use of their time. In particular if the frequency of these events were fixed as some rate in the future, this represents an additional workload for which huge benfits due not appear liekly to ensue
Some entities related to the IETF clearly have outreach and advocacy as part of the mission, Internet Society, IETF chair, Liaisons edu team and so forth. It is not clear to me that beyond the scope of chartered working group doucments that end up as part of the RFC series that working group activities including meetings are well suited for use as an outreach mechanism. The IETF meeting as a whole, which certainly an opportunity for advancing the work of the respective working groups is also an opportunity for cross pollination, for the collegial building of consensus that advances joint efforts, and to the extent that mini-IETF's do not support those activities relative to the three annual meetings their utility as outreach tools lacks some degree of legitimacy.
TBD
The author would like to thank Ron Bonica, Fred Baker and Jari Arko for offering input prior to work on the draft commencing.
This memo Makes no request of IANA.
No security consequences are envisioned as a proeduct of this draft.