Internet DRAFT - draft-kuehlewind-shmoo-online-meeting
draft-kuehlewind-shmoo-online-meeting
Network Working Group M. Kuehlewind
Internet-Draft Ericsson
Intended status: Informational M. Duke
Expires: 2 September 2022 Google
1 March 2022
Guidelines for the Organization of Fully Online Meetings
draft-kuehlewind-shmoo-online-meeting-04
Abstract
This document provides guidelines for the planning and organization
of fully online meetings, regarding the number, length, and
composition of sessions on the meeting agenda. These guidelines are
based on the experience during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Discussion Venues
This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC.
Discussion of this document takes place on the Stay Home Meet Only
Online Working Group mailing list (manycouches@ietf.org), which is
archived at https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/manycouches/.
Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at
https://github.com/mirjak/draft-shmoo-online-meeting.
Status of This Memo
This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the
provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute
working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-
Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.
Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference
material or to cite them other than as "work in progress."
This Internet-Draft will expire on 2 September 2022.
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Copyright Notice
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Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
2. Some History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Guidelines for Online Meeting Planning . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3.1. Time Zone Selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.1.1. Rules for selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
3.2. Number of Days and Total Hours per Day . . . . . . . . . 5
3.3. Session/Break Length . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
3.4. Number of Parallel Tracks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
4. Additional Considerations and Recommendations . . . . . . . . 7
4.1. Full vs. limited agenda (and interim meetings) . . . . . 7
4.2. Flexibility of time usage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4.3. Chances for inclusivity and Lessons Learnt on
socializing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
4.4. Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
5. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
6.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1. Introduction
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the IETF to move all its
plenary meetings to online-only events. This document records the
experience gained by holding plenary meetings fully online and the
guidelines that have evolved from this experience. The aim of this
document is to determine rough consensus of these guidelines in the
sense that the most participants are sufficiently satisfied with the
current organization of fully online events. These guidelines,
however, document only one option of running fully online meetings.
But as the IETF has done for in-person meetings, changes to the
organization of the meetings and the meeting agenda should be
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experimented with in the process of establishing future meeting
guidelines.
2. Some History
When the WHO declared a world-wide pandemic in March 2020, the IETF
had to quickly cancel its plenary meeting and organize an online
replacement (within less than two weeks). For this first online-only
meeting, the agenda was reduced to a set of sessions that benefitted
most from cross-area participation, like BoFs, first-time meetings of
a new working groups, and dispatch sessions, as well as the
administrative plenary in order to organize the official hand-over
procedures that occur at the March meeting.
With such a reduced agenda, it was possible to organize the meeting
within roughly 2 sessions (about 4 hours) a day and a maximum of two
parallel tracks. This was possible as all working group meetings
were moved to interims which were then distributed over the coming
six weeks. However, this was often perceived as increased load over
a longer time. But at that point of time there was not necessarily
an expectation that the situation would continue as long as it did.
For the following meetings in 2020, the online schedule was switched
back to be similar to an in-person meeting (1-2 hour slots and 8-9
parallel tracks as described below), however, still with a reduced
total length of initially 5 hours a day and then 6 hours with longer
breaks.
All fully online meetings in 2020 have followed the time zone of the
planned in-person meeting location, but starting roughly around noon.
Some flexibility with the start time to be "around" noon has been
used to mitigate the worse possible time slots, even though, given
the distribution of participants it is not possible to avoid certain
hours entirely. The in-person meeting location follows the 1-1-1
rule as documented in [RFC8719] to rotate between Asia, Europe, and
North America. While the exact time slot used had led to various
discussions, following roughly the 1-1-1 rule to share the pain has/
seems to have rough consensus.
3. Guidelines for Online Meeting Planning
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3.1. Time Zone Selection
This time selection enables to have 2 out of 3 fully online IETF
plenary meetings during the day from most participants. Basically
every full online meeting is for two regions of the three regions
described in [RFC8179], roughly speaking, after sunrise or after
dinner. This has the tradeoff that it maps the third region in
middle of night. However, that also means for most participants only
one remote meeting per year might require a significant change to
sleep schedules.
The times are also seasonally adjusted to leverage differentials in
Daylight Savings Time. These time slots are as follows, in UTC:
+===============+=========================+=========================+
| Name | Times (Northern Summer) | Times (Northern |
| | | Winter) |
+===============+=========================+=========================+
| North America | 0500-1100 UTC | 0600-1200 UTC |
| Night | | |
+---------------+-------------------------+-------------------------+
| Asia Night | 1300-1900 UTC | 1400-2000 UTC |
+---------------+-------------------------+-------------------------+
| Europe Night | 2200-0400 UTC | 2200-0400 UTC |
+---------------+-------------------------+-------------------------+
Table 1
The intent of rotating between these three slots is to scatter
meetings throughout the course of the global day, to maximize the
ease of participants to occasionally attend regardless of their
location and what time of day is optimal for their schedule.
3.1.1. Rules for selection
The IETF will select a start time from these three choices based on
the past three meetings. The following table covers all permutations
of previous meetings held in-person in Region A, B, or C; or remotely
in the nights of one of those regions.
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+================+================+==============+==================+
| 3 meetings ago | 2 meetings ago | Last Meeting | Online |
| | | | Selection |
+================+================+==============+==================+
| Any | Any | In-Person A | A Night |
+----------------+----------------+--------------+------------------+
| Any | Online A Night | Online B | C Night |
| | | Night | |
+----------------+----------------+--------------+------------------+
| Online A Night | In-Person B | Online B | C Night |
| | | Night | |
+----------------+----------------+--------------+------------------+
| In-Person A | In-Person B | Online B | A Night |
| | | Night | |
+----------------+----------------+--------------+------------------+
| In-Person A | In-Person A | Online A | see below |
| | | Night | |
+----------------+----------------+--------------+------------------+
| Online A Night | Online B Night | Online C | A Night |
| | | Night | |
+----------------+----------------+--------------+------------------+
Table 2
Basically this table follows two rules: 1) When ever a fully online
meeting follows an in-person meeting, the online meeting time is used
that disadvantages most the participants of the time zone where the
in-person meeting was held. 2) If multiple fully online meetings
follow each other, the time zone selection should be rotated based on
the most recent time zones that the in-person meetings were held in.
The final case occurs in the rare event that back-to-back in-person
plenaries occur in the same region. In this case, find the most
recent meeting that was neither in 'A' (if in person) nor in 'A'
night (if remote). If this meeting was in-person in region 'B', then
the next meeting will be in 'B' Night. If it was remote in 'B'
Night, the next meeting will be in 'C' Night.
To initialize this algorithm, IETF 112 is considered as an 'Asia
Night' remote meeting, and IETF 111 is a 'Europe Night' remote
meeting.
3.2. Number of Days and Total Hours per Day
Online meetings have converged to run over 5 days with 6-hour meeting
days, roughly. Only the administrative plenary, which concludes with
multiple open mic sessions, is not necessarily time-bounded.
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Based on the experience so far, 6 hours of online meetings, with two
30 minutes breaks, appears to be potentially a natural limit of what
is handleable for most participants. Respectively, the meeting
survey after IETF 109 has indicated a high satisfaction with the
distribution of sessions over 5 days but only a medium satisfaction
with the overall length of each day [https://www.ietf.org/blog/
ietf108-survey-results-informed-planning/].
While there is a possible trade-off between shorter but more days, a
compact and potentially intense meeting was slightly preferred from
the beginning by the community. And, different than for in-person
meetings, also utilize time during the weekend was never considered
as a possible option. So far, it was possible for all meetings to
fit the requested number of sessions within 5 days, with the
respective number of parallel tracks, see Section Section 3.4.
3.3. Session/Break Length
For fully online meetings there are typically less sessions per day,
than for in-person meetings, in order to keep the overall meeting day
to at roughly 6 hours. The reduction of the number of sessions per
day led to the practice of offering chairs only two options for
session length (instead of three), in order to make session
scheduling more practical.
At IETF-108, based on an indicated preference of the community, 50
and 100 minute slot were used, with only 10 minutes breaks, in order
to keep the overall day length at 5 hours. This resulted in many
sessions going over time and thereby clearly indicated that only 10
minutes for breaks are not practical.
The survey after IETF-109 showed a high satisfaction with 60/120
minute session lengths and 30 minute breaks, and a significant
improvement in satisfaction over IETF-108.
[https://www.ietf.org/blog/ietf-109-post-meeting-survey/]
While the option to shorten the breaks was discussed during the later
meetings, a saving of in total 10-20 minutes per day might not
balance the need to use the breaks for recreation or at least some
socialising.
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3.4. Number of Parallel Tracks
Fully online meetings are not limited in the number of parallel
tracks by the physical restriction of a meeting venue aka the number
of meeting rooms. In order to reduce the number of possible
conflicts, it is still desirable to minimise the number of parallel
tracks by balancing the requested sessions mostly equally over the
available slots.
But if the total number of requested sessions exceeds the capacity of
the usual 8 parallel tracks, it is possible for a fully online
meeting to simply use more tracks. This also means, if the number of
meeting days is seen as fixed, this decision is implicitly made by
the working group chairs requesting a certain number of sessions and
length.
As more parallel sessions usually also mean more conflicts, chairs
are encouraged to request plenary meeting time carefully but also
based on realistic planning to avoid running over time. Use of
interim meetings should be consider instead where possible and
sensible, as discussed in Section Section 4.1.
4. Additional Considerations and Recommendations
4.1. Full vs. limited agenda (and interim meetings)
The IETF-108 meeting survey asked about the structure of that meeting
(full meeting) compared to that of IETF 107, which hosted only a
limited set of session followed by interims in the weeks after. The
structure of IETF 108 was preferred by 82%
[https://www.ietf.org/blog/ietf-108-meeting-survey/]. While the
limited agenda of IETF-107 could have been a good one-time
replacement, the value of cross-participation and high active
meetings weeks has been recognised as important for continuous
progress (and not only for newly initiated work).
A highly concentrated meeting, in structure similar to the in-person
plenary meeting, provides value for cross-participants. Further a
well defined meeting time, rather than spreading many interims over
the whole year can make deconflicting with other non-IETF meetings
easier.
While the time during an in-person meeting can be used very
intensively, even a compact and full online schedule does often not
prevent day-job duties to occur in parallel. Therefore, allocating
more time can also make it more difficult for people to join and as
such needs to be balanced with the option to distribute load better
over the entirely year by a more regular use of interim meetings.
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Use of (more) online interim meetings can also help to reduce
scheduling conflicts during an IETF week and allow for a more optimal
schedule for the key participants. Of course these interim meetings
are less likely to attract people with casual interest but provide a
good opportunity for the most active participants of a group to have
detailed technical discussions and solve recorded issues efficiently.
4.2. Flexibility of time usage
This document recommends that new opportunities in the use and
scheduling of online meeting time should be explored that can help to
reduce conflicts during the plenary meeting.
Online meetings provide an opportunity to use more time more
flexibly. While for an in-person meeting all sessions have to be
fitted into the available time people are willing to travel at once
(usually roughly a week), online meetings do not have that
constraint. Therefore for the planning of online meetings, there is
a trade-off between the number of parallel tracks, where more
parallel tracks mean more potential conflicts (as least of high-
active participants), and the overall time in terms of hours per day
or total days used.
As one example, it would be possible to keep most regular working
group sessions within the usually five main meeting days but have
some of the more conflicted sessions in other dedicated time slots.
As the Hackathon for online only meetings is usually held in the week
before the online plenary meeting [I-D.ietf-shmoo-hackathon], that
week is already a highly active week for many IETF participants and
might provide an opportunity to schedule a few selected sessions. If
only one session at a time needs to be scheduled, it is easier to use
a time slot that is well assessable for most people in the community
in various time zones. This might work especially well for sessions
that are of high interest for a large part of community, such as BoFs
and dispatch meetings, and therefore hard to schedule during the main
IETF week.
4.3. Chances for inclusivity and Lessons Learnt on socializing
Participation at the most recent online only meetings was rather high
and had a quite stable per-country distribution, even though time
zones were rotated. This indicates that online meetings support a
more easy and therefore potentially broader participation than in-
person meetings where participation is often fluctuating based on the
location.
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However, it has also been recognised that the online meeting does not
provide an equivalent opportunity to socialize. The observed slight
decrease in submission of new (-00) drafts, while the overall number
of draft submissions and productivity seem to stay stable, might also
be an indication of the loss of these interactions. The increase in
interim meetings potentially compensates for these missing
interactions for continuous work (or may even increase productivity
there), but seems to be less adequate to spark new ideas.
None of the data observed so far can, however, be interpreted as
showing a significant trend. However, these factors should be
considered for the organization of future online-only meetings in
replacement or addition to in-person meetings.
4.4. Experiments
Similar as for in-person meetings, it is desirable to experiment with
the meeting structure. Often only practical experience can answer
open questions. It is recommended to not experiment with a larger
number of different aspects at the same time, in order to be able to
assess the outcome correctly. It is further recommended to announce
any such experiment in advance, so people adjust to changes and
potentially provide feedback.
5. Acknowledgments
6. References
6.1. Normative References
[RFC8179] Bradner, S. and J. Contreras, "Intellectual Property
Rights in IETF Technology", BCP 79, RFC 8179,
DOI 10.17487/RFC8179, May 2017,
<https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8179>.
[RFC8719] Krishnan, S., "High-Level Guidance for the Meeting Policy
of the IETF", BCP 226, RFC 8719, DOI 10.17487/RFC8719,
February 2020, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8719>.
6.2. Informative References
[I-D.ietf-shmoo-hackathon]
Eckel, C., "Running an IETF Hackathon", Work in Progress,
Internet-Draft, draft-ietf-shmoo-hackathon-04, 19 January
2022, <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-
shmoo-hackathon-04>.
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Authors' Addresses
Mirja Kuehlewind
Ericsson
Email: mirja.kuehlewind@ericsson.com
Martin Duke
Google
Email: martin.h.duke@gmail.com
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