Longer or more meetings?

[Henning Schulzrinne]

> 
> Basavaraj> Another thing to note is that the 2 hr or 2.5 hr meeting at the
> Basavaraj> IETFs is rarely sufficient. In order to get everything on the
> Basavaraj> agenda fit in, chairs tend to close discussions or push it
> Basavaraj> off to the list. This is counter-productive. One way to deal
> Basavaraj> with this is to increase WG meeting times to half-a-day slots. 
> 
> That would double the length of the IETF meeting to be 8 days. So this is
> another case of needing to find a balance.

This is only true if we assume that the number of parallel sessions is 
the same as it is now. Besides minor hotel issues and tradition, the 
maximum parallelism seems to be driven by the number of areas since you 
want the ADs in each WG meeting. However, for a number of other reasons 
discussed elsewhere some increase in this number may be helpful.


> 
> Also, if 1/2 day is better than 2 hours, why isn't a full day better still,
> or 2 days or 4? This, of course, leads to the focus that has been developing
> on having interim meetings. As has been noted, however, the implied
> requirement to attend meetings, is exclusionary.

Clearly, there's some curve of diminishing returns as you approach the 
continuously meeting IETF. It might be interesting to compare the total, 
per-WG meeting time in other organizations. How often do W3C F2F occur? 
IEEE meetings?

 From http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/meeting/future_meetings.html, 
IEEE 802 plenaries are three times a year and 802.11 seems to meet once 
between each plenary.

> 
> Perhaps the real challenge is to find way to do more work online and/or more
> work in design teams that are legitimately responsive to working group rough
> consensus?
> 
> d/