--On Tuesday, 10 November, 2009 17:05 +0900 Stanislav Shalunov <shalu...@bittorrent.com> wrote:
>... > Here are some immediate, but invalid, objections that this > proposal is prone to elicit: > > "But nobody will come to the technical plenary Friday > afternoon!" -- > 1. We did come to the technical plenary when it was the last > thing on Thursday, and it was in the evening. But, depending on location, attendance at the Thursday Plenary was often lower than that at the Wednesday one as people try to leave town. Also note that, for people trying to get home to families before the weekend (see below for more on that subject), there is a huge difference between leaving Thursday night or Friday morning (or for some location pairs, Friday afternoon) and trying to make people travel Saturday, especially after we have wiped out the prior weekend with Sunday meetings of various sorts, a Sunday evening reception, and sessions first thing Monday. For some participants, travel Saturday just isn't going to happen if they see any alternative, no matter what scheduling tricks we perform to provide incentives. > 2. If people won't come to the technical plenary, they won't > come to WG meetings. If it's an unsuitable meeting time, we > should not put WGs there. But, if people are trying to lose as little as the weekend as possible, there are large differences as one goes down the curve from "leave Thursday night after the plenary" to "leave early Friday" to "leave early Friday afternoon" to "leave Friday night" to "leave Saturday". > "Can't we just make sure it's not the same groups that get put > on Friday?" -- > Zero-sum redistribution of pain pitting WGs against one > another does not reduce total pain. We can fix the bug > instead of making everyone suffer equally. You can't fix the bug except by doing away with Friday sessions except for special meetings and groups that want them. We need to keep in mind that the IETF can't fire someone for not attending that that, in many countries, companies are prohibited by law from firing someone who refuses to work on weekends. The only thing that surprises me about the Friday situation is that more people haven't voted with their feet. >... > We shouldn't suffer from the Friday bug and repeat "normal > day" mantra. We should fix the bug that detached the > technical plenary from the end of the IETF meeting by moving > it to the end again. Also keep in mind that, as the IETF becomes more international, Friday is part of the (religious as well as secular) weekend for some cultures and that the religious weekend starts late Friday afternoon for others. I think there are reasonable odds that the problems with Friday meetings --especially those that run into the afternoon -- are going to get worse over time, no matter what the IETF does. Disclosure: I don't buy the theory that we solve the demand for more slots by making the meetings longer. I think it ultimately would take us to two weeks off meetings or demand for late-afternoon Friday meeting slots at least. I've proposed in the past that areas be limited in the number of WGs that they are permitted to have by the number they can manage effectively. The latter should include putting a ceiling on the total number of meeting slots, allocated among areas as the IESG chooses. If there is demand for more meeting times than that limit permits, the ADs will have to prioritize... which would probably be a good thing. I'd even like to see the Nomcom ask IESG candidates whether they consider unbounded meeting-length creep acceptable and what they intend to do about it. john _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf