Joel,

Thanks for writing this. I have some detailed comments, but perhaps I should first start with my own perception of the meeting.

I traveled to this meeting as a part my trip to attend RIPE a few days, and to catch a few different people in the hallways on separate topics. One datapoint: I would probably not have made the trip just for RIPE this time (although I usually do travel to them), nor would I have attended just for the LIM itself.

I was quite surprised by the small attendance, what I heard from the secretariat was 30+ people registered for the interim. From a pure financial perspective this meeting did not seem to make a lot of sense for the IETF, 30 x 100$ for a lot of secretariat effort/travel, and presumably money for room fees and other costs. Most previous interim meetings have operated on a hosting/sponsoring model, or run in zero cost environments. I'd say that anything under hundred persons is probably easier to deal with in that way than attempt to use an official organization for it.

But money is really a side issue, so lets not focus on the above too much. What matters if we can progress the IETF's work:

The various meeting had a big difference between them. The SIDR meeting was clearly a close group of people with an intent to solve a design problem, going over an issue after another issue, involving people who would not have traveled to the IETF, and at least from my perspective the meeting was making quite a lot of progress in some issues that had been divisive earlier. This reminded me of some earlier SOFTWIRE meetings, for instance, where the designers and implementors met and made a lot of progress. An excellent meeting!

FWIW, in the IETF I would not have had time to go to SIDR, and I would not have traveled anywhere to go to a SIDR meeting. But I'm glad I went to this one because it allowed me to learn more about this technology, and some of the layer nine implications at the IAB force me to try to understand its state.

I did not attend OPSEC, but I attended V6OPS. All discussions were useful, but topics seemed somewhat disconnected, and they did not cover the whole range of usual V6OPS work. It was clear that the room did not have the full set of key contributors in the WG. I had prepared comments on a recent topic in the mailing list, but the relevant people were not there to receive my comments. Nevertheless, the V6OPS meeting did have a fair number of the usual experts in this topic, as well as a couple of extra people from the European routing community. I was able to have a high-bandwidth discussion on several topics with the people present; albeit that was in the hallways and after the meeting. We started one new draft for V6OPS based on this interim, and another (yet to be completed) work item for the HOMENET WG. In the latter case I would not have had the necessary people present in the IETF, so for me this was quite positive.

It is hard to tell why there was no more attendance in V6OPS. Wrong time and place? Or true lack of interest to invest in some of the topics that we are just not seeing it in the IETF because everyone comes there anyway?

Conclusions? Maybe we need more discussion on this, but here are some obvious ones:

o  Interim meetings can be extremely productive in the right situation. Or completely unnecessary in others. It is difficult to find a situation where the planets are properly aligned such that several working groups are in the right phase to have an interim meeting, and that the co-location with some event makes sense for all of those working groups. In other words, the success of a LIM seems somewhat unlikely, though there may be success for individual WG interims.

o  Co-location with RIPE appeared useful. I agree with you Joel that tighter packing would have made a difference. I met some people who noted they will not attend, but probably would have attended if it was during the week. Co-locating individual WG interims with RIPEs and NANOGs seems like a useful concept to consider in the future.

o  LIMs will not create a new big funding source for the IETF. We should also right-size our organization for the task at hand. 30, 50, or even 100 people could probably be handled as part of the RIPE meeting, and might have been something that the RIPE registration system and agenda could have accommodated, or have someone sponsor a room and leave the rest to participants.

o  As usual, hallways matter more than the official meetings. Put the right people in the same building, and I'll attend, even if the topic would be International Charactersets for EBCDIC-based FTP.

o  Saturday is not a good day.

Detailed comments:

>     The LIM was the attempt that I am aware of an interim meeting
>     scheduled by IETF management for the purposes of accumulating interim

Does not parse. Did you mean to say that LIM was the only attempt of its kind? A couple of years ago we also had the Malta proposal which failed (possibly due to the downturn, or possibly due to the same issues that made the Amsterdam event surprisingly small).

>     meetings in a common location rather that scheduled by working-group
>     participants, chairs nad coordinating ADs.

s/and/nad

>     It is, my understanding that discussion of the possbility of a LIM
>     style meeting occured early2011 if not before.

s/possbility/possibility/
s/early2011/early 2011/

There has been discussions of something like this over the years. FWIW I am not aware of the exact details of when and how this LIM discussion started. Maybe Ron or someone else from the current IESG could explain it.


> The stated rational for targeting v6ops
>     involvement in a large interim was the volume of work that we process
>     during and between meetings.

Interestingly, the amount of work in the interim meeting itself did not seem match this as well as I would have expected. We can speculate about the causes.

I came prepared to talk about certain topics, but the draft authors in question were not present. Perhaps an isolated case, but had the impression that you guys dealt with only a subset of the work that v6ops meetings in IETF deal with. Do you agree?

> Superficially only a fraction of the v6ops attendees are
>     represented by the interested segment however when the numbers are
>     mapped against active participants and draft authors, interested
>     participants in the interim represent a bigger purportion of that
>     group

Missing ".".

I think we have a participant list. It would be useful to have an understanding of how many % of the people who presented or made mike line comments in IETF-84 were present in the interim.

>     One osbervation that I would make about the interim submission
>

observation

>     V6ops attendance at an IETF meeting is typically in excess of 200
>     attendees.  An interim meeting that attracts 25 of those and
>     minuscule remote participation is necessarily exclusionary by default
>     if not deliberately.  If useful work that advances drafts, gets done,
>     is that exclusivity a bad thing?  It's not useful for measuring
>     meaningful consensus.

They are different meetings. And for sure the interim meetings do not help in measuring consensus. However, at their best they are meetings where closely knit groups of core developers can progress their work in a high-bandwidth collaboration environment. I have yet to see an interim meeting that would actually represent any meaningful consensus measurement point (to the extent any physical meeting can; the list is what counts). Or perhaps the Montreal IPv6 transition meeting was one, attended by close to a hundred persons. In any case, this does not necesssarily render the interim meetings useless, just that you have to use them as a different tool. Progress work. Move forward in design. Write specs. But far less consensus measurement, far less various experts from different domains, etc. Useful early in the work, not so useful later when finetuning something.

>     Area director's were rather well represent at the LIM, While the
>     attendance of both of our Directors was appreciated I'm not sure that
>     it's a good use of their time.  In particular if the frequency of
>     these events were fixed as some rate in the future, this represents
>     an additional workload for which huge benfits due not appear liekly
>     to ensue

There were also (at least) two IAB members, both of whom were present on site for other reasons as well.

Jari