idnits 2.17.1 draft-kuehlewind-shmoo-online-meeting-01.txt: Checking boilerplate required by RFC 5378 and the IETF Trust (see https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info): ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- No issues found here. Checking nits according to https://www.ietf.org/id-info/1id-guidelines.txt: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- No issues found here. Checking nits according to https://www.ietf.org/id-info/checklist : ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ** The document seems to lack a Security Considerations section. ** The document seems to lack an IANA Considerations section. (See Section 2.2 of https://www.ietf.org/id-info/checklist for how to handle the case when there are no actions for IANA.) Miscellaneous warnings: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- == The copyright year in the IETF Trust and authors Copyright Line does not match the current year -- The document date (18 May 2021) is 1072 days in the past. Is this intentional? Checking references for intended status: Informational ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- No issues found here. Summary: 2 errors (**), 0 flaws (~~), 1 warning (==), 1 comment (--). Run idnits with the --verbose option for more detailed information about the items above. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2 Network Working Group M. Kuehlewind 3 Internet-Draft Ericsson 4 Intended status: Informational M. Duke 5 Expires: 19 November 2021 F5 Networks, Inc. 6 18 May 2021 8 Guidelines for the Organization of Fully Online Meetings 9 draft-kuehlewind-shmoo-online-meeting-01 11 Abstract 13 This document provides guidelines for the planning and organization 14 of fully online meetings, regarding the number, length, and 15 composition of sessions on the meeting agenda. These guidelines are 16 based on the experience after the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. 18 Discussion Venues 20 This note is to be removed before publishing as an RFC. 22 Discussion of this document takes place on the Stay Home Meet Only 23 Online Working Group mailing list (manycouches@ietf.org), which is 24 archived at https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/manycouches/. 26 Source for this draft and an issue tracker can be found at 27 https://github.com/mirjak/draft-shmoo-online-meeting. 29 Status of This Memo 31 This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the 32 provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. 34 Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering 35 Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute 36 working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- 37 Drafts is at https://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. 39 Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months 40 and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any 41 time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference 42 material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." 44 This Internet-Draft will expire on 19 November 2021. 46 Copyright Notice 48 Copyright (c) 2021 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the 49 document authors. All rights reserved. 51 This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal 52 Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (https://trustee.ietf.org/ 53 license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. 54 Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights 55 and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components 56 extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text 57 as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are 58 provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. 60 Table of Contents 62 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 63 2. Some History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 64 3. Guidelines for Online Meeting Planning . . . . . . . . . . . 4 65 3.1. Time Zone Selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 66 3.1.1. Rules for selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 67 3.2. Number of Days and Total Hours per Day . . . . . . . . . 5 68 3.3. Session/Break Length . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 69 3.4. Number of Parallel Tracks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 70 3.5. Full vs. limited agenda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 71 4. Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 72 5. Chances and Lessons Learnt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 73 6. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 74 7. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 75 Authors' Addresses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 77 1. Introduction 79 In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the IETF to move all its 80 plenary meetings to online-only events. This document mainly records 81 the experience gained by holding all three plenary meetings in 2020 82 fully online 83 and noting down the guidelines that have been followed since. The 84 aim of this document is to determine rough consensus of these 85 guidelines in the sense that the most participants are sufficiently 86 satisfied with the current organization of fully online events. 87 These guidelines, however, document only one option of running fully 88 online meetings. But as the IETF has done for in-person meetings, 89 changes to the organization of the meetings and the meeting agenda 90 should be experimented with in the process of establishing future 91 meeting guidelines. 93 2. Some History 95 When the WHO declared a world-wide pandemic in March 2020, the IETF 96 had to quickly cancel its plenary meeting and organize an online 97 replacement instead (within less than two weeks). At that point, for 98 this first online-only meeting, the agenda was reduced to a set of 99 sessions that benefits most from cross-area participation, like BoFs, 100 first-time meetings of a new working groups, or dispatch sessions, as 101 well as the administrative plenary in order to organize the official 102 hand-over procedures that occur at the March meeting. 104 With that reduced agenda, it was possible to organize the meeting 105 within roughly 2 sessions (about 4 hours) a day and a maximum of two 106 parallel tracks. This was possible as all working group meetings 107 were instead moved to interims which were then distributed over the 108 coming six weeks. However, this was often perceived as increased 109 load over a longer time. But at that point of time there was not 110 necessarily an expectation that the situation would continue as long 111 as it did. 113 For the following meetings in 2020, the online schedule was retained 114 in a fashion similar to an in-person meeting (1-2 hour slots and 8-9 115 parallel tracks as described below), however, still with a reduced 116 total length of initially 5 hours a day and then 6 hours with longer 117 breaks. As with in per-person meetings, the total number of sessions 118 depends on the number of requested sessions by working and research 119 group chairs, which were encouraged to request rather shorter and 120 less slots. However, this in some cases also led to overcrowded 121 agendas and sessions going over time (which is often also observed at 122 in-person meetings). In general, the total number and hours of 123 interim meetings has probably also increased in 2020, potentially 124 indicating a change in the way people work as well as increased 125 comfort participating in online meetings in general. More interim 126 meetings are sometimes also perceived as increased load but may also 127 help to make more continuous progress. This discussion is on-going 128 and not in scope for this document. 130 All fully online meetings in 2020 have followed the time zone of the 131 planned in-person meeting location, but starting roughly around noon 132 instead. Some flexibility with the start time to be "around" noon 133 has been used to mitigate the worse possible time slots, even though, 134 given the distribution of participants it is not possible to avoid 135 certain hours entirely. The in-person meeting location follows the 136 1-1-1 rule as documented in [RFC8719] to rotate between Asia, Europe, 137 and North America. While the exact time slot used had let to various 138 discussions, following this 1-1-1 rule to share the pain has/seems to 139 have rough consensus. 141 3. Guidelines for Online Meeting Planning 143 3.1. Time Zone Selection 145 All fully online IETF plenary meetings begin at 0500 ("Asia"), 1200 146 ("Europe"), or 2100 ("North America") UTC. The names are not meant 147 to imply that all participants in a given region will find the times 148 convenient given their personal schedules, but are useful for the 149 selection rules below. These location names are consistent with the 150 venue selection criteria in [RFC8719]. 152 The selected slots have been proposed to minimize inconvenience while 153 not excessively penalizing any time zone. Effectively, there is an 154 early morning and a late afternoon meeting for two of the three 155 regions in each slot. E.g. the "Asia" 0500 UTC slot would be 0600 156 CET (early morning) and 1300 China Standard Time (afternoon). Since 157 fully online meeting days are expected to be shorter then in-person 158 meetings, this slot is roughly within the "usual" working hours of 159 both regions. 161 The intent of rotating between these three slots is to scatter 162 meetings throughout the course of the global day, to maximize the 163 ease of participants to occasionally attend regardless of their 164 location and what time of day is optimal for their schedule. 166 3.1.1. Rules for selection 168 The IETF will select a start time from these three choices according 169 the following rules, applied in order. 171 1. Eliminate all regions that had an in-person meeting in that 172 calendar year. If one region remains, select the time slot 173 mapped to that region. 175 2. Eliminate all regions that have a planned in-person meeting that 176 calendar year. If one region remains, select the time slot 177 mapped to that region. 179 3. Select the region that has least recently had an fully online 180 IETF plenary in its slot. For the pandemic cancellations of 181 2020- 2021, the original host cities are used to determine the 182 host region. Therefore, at the time of writing the most recent 183 selections are Asia in November 2020, Europe in March 2021, and 184 North America in July 2021. 186 3.2. Number of Days and Total Hours per Day 188 Online meetings have converged to run over 5 days with 6-hour meeting 189 days, roughly. Only, the administrative plenary, which concludes 190 with multiple open mic sessions, is not necessarily time-bounded. 192 Based on the experience so far, 6 hours of online meetings, with two 193 30 minutes breaks, appears to be potentially a natural limited of 194 what is handleable for most participants. Respectively, the meeting 195 survey after IETF 109 has indicated a high satisfaction with the 196 distribution of sessions over 5 days but only a medium satisfaction 197 with the overall length of each day [https://www.ietf.org/blog/ 198 ietf108-survey-results-informed-planning/]. 200 While there is a possible trade-off between shorter but more days, a 201 compact and potentially intense meeting was slightly prefer from the 202 beginning by the community. And, different than for in-person 203 meetings, it was never seen as a necessary option to also utilize 204 time during the weekend. So far, it was possible for all meetings to 205 fit the requested number of sessions within 5 days, with the 206 respective number of parallel tracks (see next section). 208 While the time during an in-person meeting can be used very 209 intensively, even a compact and full online schedule does often not 210 prevent day-job duties to occur in parallel. Therefore, allocating 211 more days can also make it more difficult for people to join and as 212 such needs to be balanced with the option to distribute load better 213 over the entirely year by a more regular use of interim meetings. 215 3.3. Session/Break Length 217 Session length and the number of parallel tracks are handled similar 218 to in-person meetings, only that there are less sessions per day to 219 keep the overall meeting day to at roughly 6 hours. The reduction to 220 three instead of four sessions per day let to the practice of 221 offering chairs only two options for session length (instead of 222 three), in order to make session scheduling more practical. 224 At IETF-108, based on an indicated preference of the community, 50 225 and 100 minute slot were used, with only 10 minutes breaks, in order 226 to keep the overall day length at 5 hours. This resulted in many 227 sessions going over time and clearly indicated that only 10 minutes 228 for breaks are not practical. 230 The survey after IETF-109 showed a high satisfaction with 60/120 231 minute session lengths and 30 minute breaks, and a significant 232 improvement in satisfaction over IETF-108. 233 [https://www.ietf.org/blog/ietf-109-post-meeting-survey/] 234 While the option to shorten the breaks was discussed during the later 235 meetings, a saving of in total 10-20 minutes per day might not 236 balance the need to use the breaks for recreation or at least some 237 socialising. 239 3.4. Number of Parallel Tracks 241 Fully online meetings are not limited in the number of parallel 242 tracks by the physical restriction of a meeting venue aka the number 243 of meeting rooms. However, the more parallel tracks there are, the 244 higher chances are for conflicts. Therefore it is desirable to 245 balance the requested sessions mostly equally over the available 246 slots and thereby minimise the number of parallel tracks where 247 possible. 249 If the number of requested sessions exceeds the number of possible 250 slots with the usual 8 parallel tracks, it is possible for an online- 251 only meeting to use more tracks. After all, this decision is 252 implicitly made by the working group chairs requesting a certain 253 number of sessions and length. While realistic planning is desired 254 to avoid running over time, chairs are still encouraged to request 255 plenary meeting time carefully and use interims where possible and 256 sensible instead. 258 3.5. Full vs. limited agenda 260 The IETF-108 meeting survey asked about the structure of that meeting 261 (full meeting) compared to that of IETF 107, which hosted only a 262 limited set of session followed by interims in the weeks after. The 263 structure of IETF 108 was preferred by 82% 264 [https://www.ietf.org/blog/ietf-108-meeting-survey/]. While the 265 limited agenda of IETF-107 could have been a good one-time 266 replacement, the value of cross participation and high active 267 meetings weeks has been recognised as important for continuous 268 progress (and not only for newly initiated work). 270 4. Experiments 272 Similar as for in-person meeting, it is desirable to experiment with 273 the meeting structure. Often only practical experience can answer 274 open questions. It is recommended to not experiment with a larger 275 number of different aspects at the same time, in order to be able to 276 assess the outcome correctly. It is further recommended to announce 277 any such experiment in advance, so people adjust to changes and 278 potentially provide feedback. 280 5. Chances and Lessons Learnt 282 Participation of the most recent online only meetings were rather 283 high and had a quite stable per-country distribution, even though 284 time zones were rotated. This indicates that online meetings support 285 a more easy and therefore potentially broader participation than in- 286 person meetings where participation is often fluctuating based on the 287 location. 289 However, it has also been recognised that the online meeting does not 290 provide an equivalent opportunity to socialize. The observed slight 291 decrease in submission of new (-00) drafts, while the overall number 292 of draft submission and productivity seem to stay stable, might also 293 be an indication of the dismiss of these interactions. The increase 294 in interim meetings potentially compensates for these missing 295 interactions for continuous work (or may even increases productivity 296 there), but seems to be less adequate to spark new ideas. 298 None of the data observed so far can, however, be interpreted as 299 showing a significant trend. However, these factors should be 300 consider for the organization of future online-only meetings in 301 replacement or addition to in-person meetings. 303 6. Acknowledgments 305 7. Normative References 307 [RFC8719] Krishnan, S., "High-Level Guidance for the Meeting Policy 308 of the IETF", BCP 226, RFC 8719, DOI 10.17487/RFC8719, 309 February 2020, . 311 Authors' Addresses 313 Mirja Kuehlewind 314 Ericsson 316 Email: mirja.kuehlewind@ericsson.com 318 Martin Duke 319 F5 Networks, Inc. 321 Email: martin.h.duke@gmail.com