Re: IETF Adelaide and interim meetings for APPS WGs

[Fred Baker <fred at cisco.com>]

At 05:45 PM 2/14/00 -0700, Vernon Schryver wrote:
>Unless you going
>to slide the IETF the rest of the way into the ITU/IEEE/ANSI swamp, won't
>the mailing lists continue to be the only official forums for the working
>groups?  Won't the working group meetings continue to be effectively
>informal, slightly more than social gatherings? 

I realize that you have not been (ahem) a regular attendee at IETF
meetings, but in my experience this has never been the case. Yes, we do
most of our work on mailing lists, and we check meeting consensus on
mailing lists before declaring it sealed in blood. But Face to Face
meetings have always been places where high bandwidth discussions take
place to clarify and progress work which is also being done on the mailing
list. They are official meetings.

So, by the way, are interim meetings, under RFC 2418. We could discuss
major initiatives which have made effective use of them  the entire SNMP
development, the development of RSVP and Diff-serv, the development of
OSPF, and many more. PPP development has happened as much at the
interoperability workshops held by Pac Bell and the PPP Consortium as they
have at IETF meetings.

Declaring an interim meeting to make progress is a Good Thing, and we don't
see a problem with that. But we need to make sure that the process is open
to all who choose to participate, and to that end the authors of RFC 2418
specified that there needed to be AD approval, sufficient notice, a strong
agenda, and minutes just as there are at the plenary meetings. Declaring an
interim meeting for the purpose of avoiding a plenary meeting is a slap in
the face to the many engineers who come from all over to the interim and
plenary meetings that we have had for lo these 14 years. They have paid
quite a bit of money and time to be intimately involved in the process. It
would be much easier, from a planning perspective, to have the meetings in
one or two spots, as the ITU does in Geneva, but we have always worked on
an ethic that says "if I am contributing to the work, the meeting must
occasionally be near me."

One sixth or more of our contributors come from Europe. A relatively small
contingent comes from the South Pacific. Quite a large percentage come from
North America. Hence, we put about one meeting in six in Europe and most of
our meetings in North America. Is it not fair to put one meeting in 47 in
the South Pacific? And why is it not an affront to those who have
faithfully come from there, have contributed and chaired working groups
from there, to complain about doing once what they have been doing for over
a decade?