Dear Stanislav;
RRG always had good attendance on Friday. It was, I think, viewed by
the people interested
as a session to schedule for.
So, one possible solution would be to see if there were WG or RG that
wanted permanent Friday status.
That way, people who wanted to attend these sessions would know that
they had to be there on Friday.
This implies that there would be people that would only come for that
day, or for the end of the week, but we have some of that already.
Marshall
On Nov 10, 2009, at 3:05 AM, Stanislav Shalunov wrote:
[I hope to raise this issue during the administrative plenary.
Because I obviously won't have time at the microphone to present the
full argument and because I might not get the chance at all, I'm
writing something down and sending it out now.]
When you participated in a WG on any Friday during the past
meetings, you probably noticed impaired attendance. This becomes
particularly visible for WG chairs, few of whom are thrilled to get
a slot on Friday.
Friday is declared to be a real day, but the declaration is
disregarded (rationally, as I'll explain) by a fraction of
participants. This makes Friday a defective day, making it rational
for more people not to attend, creating a positive feedback loop
making it more defective.
The fuzzy end bug wasn't always there. When the IETF didn't have
sessions on Friday, the technical plenary was the last thing that
happened during each meeting for normal participants [1]. The
plenaries have the largest attendance, so it put a very sharp stop
to the IETF meeting. When Friday sessions were added, there were
few to begin with, so the end got fuzzy and the attendance problems
began.
For some participants, it is rational to skip Friday in its present
form. Checking this meeting's agenda, Monday currently has 124
track-hours [2] worth of sessions. (Tuesday-Thursday are similar
full-day affairs for most people, even if differently structured
because of the social and the plenaries.) Friday currently has 29.5
track-hours worth of sessions, ~4.2 times less. For a person who is
only interested in a few sessions, there's a good chance that none
of them will fall on Friday. If the person judges that the
relatively small probability of missing an interesting session (or,
more precisely, the relatively small expected number of interesting
sessions) that fall(s) on Friday, multiplied by the cost of missing
a session, is smaller than the cost of an extra day of travel, it is
rational for them not to attend Friday. Repeating that Friday is a
normal day is not going to change the calculation if Friday
continues to be ~4.2 less valuable.
Once these participants choose to go home on Friday, the value of
Friday is further depleted. Not only there are fewer sessions on
Friday, but they are not as well attended, creating a multiplier
through a positive feedback loop.
The bug is easy to fix: we should restore the technical plenary to
where it was before -- namely, to the very end of the IETF meeting
for normal participants.
Put the technical plenary on Friday afternoon. This will make it
natural to increase the number of track-sessions on Friday. This
will restore a sharp end to the IETF, fixing the Friday bug.
A side effect of the fix is that it would increase the total number
of available track-hours by about 15%, making scheduling easier for
the next few meetings after implementation.
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.
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.
+1
Marshall
"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.
"Can't we only put unimportant sessions, like second sessions and
maybe these two session I personally don't like, on Friday?" --
No. Friday started out with only non-technical sessions. The first
was IPR, if I recall. The IETF needed more first-class technical
track-hours, which is why they bled into Friday. We have no plan to
reduce the number of sessions. Moving technical plenary to Friday
afternoon would, instead of reducing the number of first-class
hours, increase it, moving Friday closer to a full day.
"Can't people just book tickets after the agenda comes out?" --
This is not the answer for two reasons:
1. Agenda changes.
2. This replaces "expected number of interesting sessions that fall
on Friday" with "number of interesting sessions that fall on
Friday". Because the expected number was lower, the actual number
will be lower on average, giving a similar aggregate effect.
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.
-- Stas
PS The WG that I cochair happened to get the short straw this
meeting with several key contributors unable to attend, which
triggered my thinking about how to fix the Friday bug, but this
message is not about any particular WGs. Again, we should not
redistribute the pain or worry if it gets distributed evenly when we
can simply remove it.
[1] "Normal participants" = {all participants} - {people who come
for a single meeting or two} - {members of IESG, IAB, etc.}
[2] track-hours = sum_slots num_sessions*duration. This is an
imperfect proxy for person-hours, because it does not take into
account number of attendees of the sessions. (I don't have data on
person-hours by day of the week.) To partially mitigate, I avoided
picking Tuesday-Thursday with the huge social event and the
plenaries as baseline.
--
Stanislav Shalunov
BitTorrent Inc
shalu...@bittorrent.com
personal: http://shlang.com
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