Longer or more meetings?

[John C Klensin]

(this is substantive, so I'm starting a new thread)

Based on Randy's comments, Jari's, and a few others, let me 
suggest another strawman.  Note that I'm not at all sure this is 
a good idea, but it probably belongs on the table.

Problem: Face time of a few hours three times a year is not 
sufficient to make progress.  Many WGs discover that they need 
interim meetings to really move forward.

Suggestion: Insist that WGs conduct interim meetings so they 
could face off in day-sized units, not slots of an hour or two 
duration.  At area option, cluster these interim meetings into 
several-day sequences, with overlaps and sequences to be 
determined by the ADs.  Cut full IETF meetings back to once a 
year, and focus their schedule around interactions, 
cross-fertilization, and cross-checking within and between areas 
and on issues of IETF-wide importance.

Possible downsides: This might push us toward professional 
standardizers.  It might reduce the quantity and quality of 
input from folks with wide perspective.  It might effectively 
kill the notion that we do most of our work, and all of our 
consensus-determination, on mailing lists rather than in 
meetings.  We might easily slip into a model in which WG 
meetings were attended by working engineers, but that IETF 
meetings were attended only by professional standardizers, 
"process experts", and general-purpose go-ers.  It should be 
noted that some of the standards bodies whom we often deprecate 
use a model roughly similar to this and have fallen into those 
patterns.

If we need broad coordination more than annually, e.g., if we 
have WGs that need inter-area examination and interactions but 
that are likely to complete their work in 12-18 months, this 
could be a real quality disaster.

Possible useful side-effect: if we made it clear that we expect 
ADs to get to most of the interim meetings of their WGs, it 
would provide a powerful incentive to them to keep the number of 
WGs in their areas small and of brief duration.

Is this worth thinking about?

     john