It can indeed be challenging, but in some circumstances, the active 
participants of the working group don't quite span the globe. I've also found 
that audio conferences seem most effective if they only last an hour or maybe 
90 minutes, but are held more regularly, rather than marathon on-line interim 
meetings. With a 10 am ET conference slot, this probably allows 90% of the IETF 
attendees to participate between 7 am and 11 pm. It seems to work for many 
international organizations - after all, organizations with offices on the west 
coast of the US and in India or China are not exactly uncommon. This also seems 
to be a common work model for other SDOs.

If done well, this model has the advantage of avoiding the spikes in activity 
every three-four months. It requires an active moderator and good tools to 
manage hand raising and queuing, but these tools are becoming readily available 
even for plain audio conferences. (I like TOHRU as simple and effective.)

Rather than looking for one magic mechanism, maybe we should try to optimize 
the ensemble, such as:
- bug/issue trackers for the document issues late in the development cycle
- email lists for general discussion and raising issues from participants who 
are more peripherally engaged with a WG or document
- in-person meetings for early small-group work and establishing personal 
relationships
- webinar-style mechanism for plenaries and WG status updates
- regular augmented audio conferences for document-level discussions

Henning

On Oct 23, 2011, at 8:44 PM, Andrew Allen wrote:

> 
> Randy
> 
> I think that also assumes that the earth's rotation will also stop at some 
> time during the next decade forcing us all to migrate to the sunny side of 
> the planet.
> 
> Failing that happening then with 18 hours at least (Tokyo to US West coast) 
> of time zones (and that doesnt take into account places like Hawaii and NZ) 
> haveing any regular or long time real time sessions is in my view impractical 
> as someone has to do it in the middle of the night then.
> 
> Andrew
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Randy Bush [mailto:ra...@psg.com]
> Sent: Sunday, October 23, 2011 12:47 PM
> To: Cullen Jennings <flu...@cisco.com>
> Cc: IETF Disgust <ietf@ietf.org>
> Subject: Re: Requirement to go to meetings
> 
> perhaps we could model using the assumption that, a decade or so hence,
> there will be no physical meetings, [almost] all will be net-based.
> 
> randy
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