I oppose this experiment. I already donate to my employer a significant
amount of travel time on weekends without wanting to add to it. Flight
schedules are tightening, thanks to the cost of fuel, which means that
having sessions on Friday at all poses a problem now, if I want to get
back by Saturday. Having afternoon sessions would put a nail in that
coffin.
I haven't decided whether I agree with Eliot entirely, but I think
he raises some good points here. I would add two more:
1. I've attended IETFs where there was a meeting on Friday all day
(e.g., the P2PSIP Ad Hoc at IETF 64) and it seemed to me that people
were pretty wiped at that point, so even though they felt that
they had to show up, I'm not sure much got done.
2. People's ability to meet tends to expand to fill out the available
meeting time.
With these two points in mind, It would be nice to have some metric of
success that's more than just people showing up to the
meetings. Unfortunately, I don't have such a metric. :(
I propose two alternative experiments:
1. Required agendas and Approval
No session can be approved without a posted agenda. Many agendas are
late, which makes it difficult for people to know where they have to be
and when.
I completely agree with this. Before each IETF I attend I use automated
tools (http://tools.ietf.org/tools/getdrafts/)
to suck down each draft on the agenda and I regularly find
a large fraction of WGs with missing agendas. As of today, the following
WGs have no agenda:
softwire, v6ops, mip4, dime, l3vpn, idnabis, l2vpn, ntp, savi, rtgwg,
ecrit, capwap, radext, opsawg, rtgarea, pkix, opsec, isis, keyprov,
vcarddav, netmod, pce, saag, grow, autoconf
It's also not just an issue of knowing where to be and when but of
getting prepared. It helps to know in advance which drafts you need
to read.
-Ekr
