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Kuehlewind 3 Internet-Draft Ericsson 4 Intended status: Informational 16 March 2021 5 Expires: 17 September 2021 7 Guidelines for the Organization of Fully Online Meetings 8 draft-kuehlewind-shmoo-online-meeting-00 10 Abstract 12 This document provides guidelines for the planning and organization 13 of fully online meetings, regarding the number, length, and 14 composition of sessions on the meeting agenda. These guideline are 15 based on the experience after the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. 17 Discussion Venues 19 This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC. 21 Discussion of this document takes place on the Stay Home Meet Only 22 Online Working Group mailing list (manycouches@ietf.org), which is 23 archived at https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/manycouches/. 25 Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at 26 https://github.com/mirjak/draft-shmoo-online-meeting. 28 Status of This Memo 30 This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the 31 provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. 33 Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering 34 Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute 35 working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- 36 Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. 38 Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months 39 and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any 40 time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference 41 material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." 43 This Internet-Draft will expire on 17 September 2021. 45 Copyright Notice 47 Copyright (c) 2021 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the 48 document authors. All rights reserved. 50 This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal 51 Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/ 52 license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. 53 Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights 54 and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components 55 extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text 56 as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are 57 provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. 59 Table of Contents 61 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 62 2. Some History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 63 3. Guidelines for Online Meeting Planning . . . . . . . . . . . 3 64 3.1. Time Zone Selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 65 3.2. Number of Days and Total Hours per Day . . . . . . . . . 4 66 3.3. Session/Break Length . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 67 3.4. Number of Parallel Tracks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 68 3.5. Full vs. limited agenda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 69 4. Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 70 5. Chances and Lessons Learnt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 71 6. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 72 7. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 73 Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 75 1. Introduction 77 In 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic forced the IETF to move all its plenary 78 meeting to online only events. This document mainly records the 79 experience gained by holding all three plenary meetings in 2020 fully 80 online and noting down the guidelines that have been followed since. 81 The aim of this document is to determine rough consensus of these 82 guidelines in the sense that the most participants are sufficiently 83 satisfied with the current organization of fully online events. 84 These guidelines, however, document only one option of running fully 85 online meeting and, similar as done for in-person meetings, changes 86 to the organization the meetings and the meeting agenda should be 87 experimented with. 89 2. Some History 91 When the WHO declared a world-wide pandemic in March 2020, the IETF 92 had to cancel its plenary impromptu and organize an online 93 replacement instead (within less than two weeks). At that point for 94 this first online only meeting, the agenda was reduced to a set of 95 sessions that benefits most from cross-area participation, like BoFs, 96 first time meetings of a new working groups, or dispatch sessions, as 97 well as the plenary in order to organize the official hand-over 98 procedures that occur at the March meeting. With that reduced agenda 99 it was possible to organize the meeting within roughly 2 session 100 (about 4 hours) a day and maximum two parallel tracks. However, all 101 working group meetings were instead move to interims distributed over 102 the coming six weeks and therefore was often perceived as increase 103 low of the a longer time. Also at that point of time there was not 104 necessarily an expectation that the situation would continues as long 105 as it did. 107 For the following meetings in 2020, the online schedule was retained 108 in a more similar fashion as for in-person meeting (1-2 hour slots 109 and 8-9 parallel tracks as described below), however, still with a 110 reduced total length of first 5 hours a day and then 6 hours with 111 longer breaks. As with in per-person meetings, the total number of 112 sessions depends on the number of requested sessions by working and 113 research group chairs, which were encouraged to request rather 114 shorter and less slots. However, this in some cases also let to 115 overcrowded agendas and session going over time (which however is 116 often also observed at in-person meetings). In general the total 117 number and hours of interim meetings has probably also increase 118 since, indicating maybe a change in the way people work and getting 119 more used to online meetings in general. More interim meetings are 120 sometimes also perceived as increased load but may also help to make 121 more continuous progress. This discussion is on-going and not in 122 scope for this document. 124 3. Guidelines for Online Meeting Planning 126 This section records what has be evolved as practise during the fully 127 online meetings held in 2020. 129 3.1. Time Zone Selection 131 All fully online meetings in 2020 have followed the time zone of the 132 planned in-person meeting location, but starting roughly around noon 133 instead. The in-person meeting location follows the 1-1-1 rule as 134 documented in RFC8719 to rotate between Asia, Europe, and North 135 America. While the exact time slot used had let to various 136 discussions, following this 1-1-1 rule to share the pain has/seems to 137 have rough consensus. 139 Some flexibility with the start time to be "around" noon has proven 140 useful to mitigate the worse possible time slots, however, it's 141 impossible to avoid certain hours entirely. There have not been 142 enough online only meetings yet to potentially converge to a fixed 143 set of 3 time slots, one for each region (potentially different for 144 summer and winter time though) but that might be an option to 145 consider to avoid repeating discussions about the exact start time. 147 3.2. Number of Days and Total Hours per Day 149 Online meetings have converged to run over 5 days with 6-hour meeting 150 days, roughly. Only, the plenary, which concludes with multiple open 151 mic sessions, is not necessarily time-bounded. 153 Based on the experience so far, 6 hours of online meetings, with two 154 30 minutes breaks, appears to be potentially a natural limited of 155 what is handleable for most participants. Respectively, the meeting 156 survey after IETF 109 has indicated a high satisfaction with the 157 distribution of sessions over 5 days but only a medium satisfaction 158 with the overall length of each day [https://www.ietf.org/blog/ 159 ietf108-survey-results-informed-planning/]. 161 While there is a possible trade-off between shorter but more days, a 162 compact and potentially intense meeting was slightly prefer from the 163 beginning by the community. And, different than for in-person 164 meetings, it was never seen as a necessary option to also utilize 165 time during the weekend. So far, it was possible for all meetings to 166 fit the requested number of sessions within 5 days, with the 167 respective number of parallel tracks (see next section). 169 While the time during an in-person meeting can be used very 170 intensively, even a compact and full online schedule does often not 171 prevent day-job duties to occur in parallel. Therefore, allocating 172 more days can also make it more difficult for people to join and as 173 such needs to be balanced with the option to distribute load better 174 over the entirely year by a more regular use of interim meetings. 176 3.3. Session/Break Length 178 Session length and the number of parallel tracks are handled similar 179 to in-person meetings, only that there are less sessions per day to 180 keep the overall meeting day to at roughly 6 hours. The reduction to 181 three instead of four sessions per day let to the pratice of offering 182 chairs only two options for session length (instead of three), in 183 order to make session scheduling more practical. 185 At IETF-108, based on an indicated preference of the community, 50 186 and 100 minute slot were used, with only 10 minutes breaks, in order 187 to keep the overall day length at 5 hours. This resulted in many 188 sessions going over time and clearly indicated that only 10 minutes 189 for breaks are not practical. 191 The survey after IETF-109 showed a high satisfaction with 60/120 192 minute session lengths and 30 minute breaks, and a significant 193 improvement in satisfaction over IETF-108. 194 [https://www.ietf.org/blog/ietf-109-post-meeting-survey/] 195 While the option to to shorten the breaks was discussed during the 196 later meetings, a saving of in total 10-20 minutes per day might not 197 balance the need to use the breaks for recreation or at least some 198 socialising. 200 3.4. Number of Parallel Tracks 202 Fully online meetings are not limited in the number of parallel 203 tracks by the physical restriction of a meeting venue aka the number 204 of meeting rooms. However, the more parallel tracks there are, the 205 higher is the chances for conflicts. Therefore it is desirable to 206 balance the requested sessions mostly equally over the available 207 slots and thereby minimise the number of parallel tracks where 208 possible. 210 If the number of requested sessions exceeds the number of possible 211 slots with the usual 8 parallel tracks, it is possible for an online 212 only meeting to use more tracks. After all, this decision is 213 implicitly made by the working group chairs requesting a certain 214 number of sessions and length. While realistic planning is desired 215 to avoid running over time, chairs are still encouraged to request 216 plenary meeting time carefully and use interims where possible and 217 sensible instead. 219 3.5. Full vs. limited agenda 221 The IETF-108 meeting survey asked about the structure of that meeting 222 (full meeting) compared to that of IETF 107, which hosted only a 223 limited set of session followed by interims in the weeks after. The 224 structure of IETF 108 was preferred by 82% 225 [https://www.ietf.org/blog/ietf-108-meeting-survey/]. While the 226 limited agenda of IETF-107 could have been a good one-time 227 replacement, the value of cross participation and high active 228 meetings weeks has been recognised as important for continuous 229 progress (and not only for newly initiated work). 231 4. Experiments 233 Similar as for in-person meeting, it is desirable to experiment with 234 the meeting structure. Often only practical experience can answer 235 open questions. It is recommended to not experiment with a larger 236 number of different aspects at the same time, in order to be able to 237 assess the outcome correctly. It is future recommend to announce any 238 such experiment in advance, so people adjust to changes and 239 potentially provide feedback. 241 5. Chances and Lessons Learnt 243 Participation of the most recent online only meetings were rather 244 high and had a quite stable per-country distribution, even though 245 time zones were rotated. This indicates that online meetings support 246 a more easy and therefore potentially broader participation than in- 247 person meeting where participation is often fluctuating based on the 248 location. 250 However, it has also been recognised that the online meeting does not 251 provide an equivalent opportunity to socialize. The observed slight 252 decrease in submission of new (-00) drafts, while the overall number 253 of draft submission and productivity seem to say stable, might also 254 be an indication of the dismiss of these interactions. The increase 255 in interim meetings potentially compensates for these missing 256 interactions for continuous work (or may even increases productivity 257 there), but seems to be less adequate to spark new ideas. 259 None of the data observed so far can, however, be interpreted as 260 showing a significant trend. However, these factors should be 261 consider for the organization of future online only meetings in 262 replacement or addition to in-person meetings. 264 6. Acknowledgments 266 7. Normative References 268 [RFC8719] Krishnan, S., "High-Level Guidance for the Meeting Policy 269 of the IETF", BCP 226, RFC 8719, DOI 10.17487/RFC8719, 270 February 2020, . 272 Author's Address 274 Mirja Kuehlewind 275 Ericsson 277 Email: mirja.kuehlewind@ericsson.com