Subject: [vmeet] what's been working/failed/tried in hubs?

From: Alia Atlas <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2016 23:47:55 -0400

I am curious about how the various IETF Hubs have been doing?
What activities have you tried and found useful/successful/interesting?
What did you try that failed miserably?

Do you have a community organizer (or group of folks) pushing the
organization
of the activities and facilitating?  Do you have different people stepping
up to pull things together?

What is your participation like?  Is it largely experienced IETFers?
 researchers & students? interested developers?

Personally, I'm brainstorming a bit about what might be useful to try in
the Boston Hub and how much to push or encourage structure.  It feels like
some can be quite useful.

Thanks,
Alia

---

From: Christian O'Flaherty <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2016 20:12:08 +0000

Hi Alia,

There’s a draft that will be updated soon with some experiences and recommendations.  

> What activities have you tried and found useful/successful/interesting?

Hubs in Latin America have been diverse:
	Some hubs were just a small gathering for remote WG session participation only.
	Some hubs were meetings with an introduction/presentation and then the WG session (sometimes with local explanations and discussions in parallel) 
	Some had a previous introduction webinar to prepare participants 
	Some hubs were organized for IETF promotion and the WG session itself was less important (more local activities)
	Sometimes (in Brazil) they were organized as remote "IETF meetings” were the students had a WG to attend in each slot.
	Some hubs were co-located with other events (academia) were a meeting room had the remote WG session

> What did you try that failed miserably?

In some cases the hubs had as few as three or four participants… but I would not consider it a failure. 
There were hubs that failed because remote participation was impossible (low quality) and they did something else. 

> Do you have a community organizer (or group of folks) pushing the organization
> of the activities and facilitating?

Yes… there’s always an organizer / facilitator

>   Do you have different people stepping up to pull things together?  

Yes… I’m including Juliao Braga from Brasil who is the main one in our region.

> 
> What is your participation like?  Is it largely experienced IETFers?  researchers & students? interested developers?

We’ve been using them for IETF engagement so they’re usually not experienced IETFers, mostly students and professors, some network operators. I’m not aware of developers but some students can count as such. 

> 
> Personally, I'm brainstorming a bit about what might be useful to try in the Boston Hub and how much to push or encourage structure.  It feels like some can be quite useful.

Please don’t consider our experiences as “best practice”. We do have completely different needs and objectives for remote hubs in our region. 

Christian

> 
> Thanks,
> Alia
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From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 7 Oct 2016 13:35:22 -0700

On 10/7/2016 1:12 PM, Christian O'Flaherty wrote:
> There were hubs that failed because remote participation was impossible (low quality)

 From this, do you have a sense of the minimum connectivity and other 
resource requirements, for successful technical operation of a hub?

d/
-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net

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From: Dhruv Dhody <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2016 10:36:48 +0530

Hi Alia,

Our IETF 94 hub in Bangalore was quite successful. The makeup was made up
of a few IETFers but mostly interested developers.  In fact, some of the
participants went on to attend and present in IETF 96 and took part in the
Hackathon. They are also planning to join IETF 97 in Seoul.

I am on the look out for new blood to both organize/attend for IETF 97.

Just a few thoughts -

(1) WG champion: Having one or two WG champion at the Hub helped to set the
tone, go over the WG agenda in advance, answer questions and continue the
discussion after the WG meeting.

(2) Discussions/Hot-Topics: Most participants can join remotely on their
own from home/work. We need to make it worthwhile for someone to travel to
the Hub, so it is important that we make sure that the hub can offer
something more.... This could be a lively discussion, networking, side
meetings on some HOT technology, tutorial etc.

(3) Agenda - getting the IETF agenda early, would help a lot in making the
sub-set agenda for the hub based on interest/timezone etc.

This is just for the Hub in Bangalore, there have been other hubs in India
targeting academia.

Regards,
Dhruv

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From: John Leslie <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2016 07:44:51 -0400

> discussion after the WG meeting.

   What time commitment is expected? (I assume the expertise expected is
for a single Working Group.)

> meetings on some HOT technology, tutorial etc.

  What's your experience with folks who need to follow more than one stream?
(I have had to remain near-home in order to cover everything I need to.
Perhaps an academic setting could maintain 8 rooms; but essentially no
workplace can do that.)

> sub-set agenda for the hub based on interest/timezone etc.

   What do you mean, early? Alia certainly has access to _premature_ agendas;
but I'm not sure they'd be helpful. And, of course, agendas _do_ change even
after the start of an IETF week...

--
John Leslie <[email-masked]>

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From: Christian O'Flaherty <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Oct 2016 16:05:33 +0000

> From this, do you have a sense of the minimum connectivity and other resource requirements, for successful technical operation of a hub?

for our “simple” LAC Hubs, the requirements are the same as those for a regular remote participant. 

I would assume that most problems are due to congestion or wi-fi issues. We recommend to the organizers to do some tests in advance but it’s usually difficult when the hubs are organized as part of a bigger event or when the organizer is not local. And even if it was possible, it’s not guaranteed that the network will have similar performance during the hub.   

If our hubs were “bigger” I would recommend minimum bandwidth requirements, wired network, projector, etc. But that imposes more workload to the organizers. 

Christian

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From: Vinayak Hegde <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2016 14:37:10 +0530

Hi John,

My draft with some observations has some answers to your questions. Also
some answers inline.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hegde-remote-hubs-india-01

> for a single Working Group.)

Not much. If you are alone with few people. Only time needed to attend the
WG meeting
and maybe some time to send out invites. The barrier (effort) for
participation is quite low.

> Perhaps an academic setting could maintain 8 rooms; but essentially no

This works best when people are on the same academic campus or there is a
cluster
of offices in IT parks nearby. You can pick and choose sessions based on
your expertise
and specific interests in your remote group (mostly it will be areas like
Routing or Apps).
or it could be general like a Tech Plenary.

> after the start of an IETF week...

I think he was talking about WG areas but these are subject to change as
well.

Thanks
Vinayak

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From: Dhruv Dhody <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2016 15:40:45 +0530

Thanks Vinayak. Let me add a few more points -

> participation is quite low.

​[Dhruv]: yes,​ the time commitment was quite less. The champion was
someone who follows the WG discussions and preferably has a draft or two in
the WG.

> or it could be general like a Tech Plenary.

​[Dhruv]: Yes, maintaining 8 rooms for parallel tracks for the whole week
is very hard. So the hub agenda has to be a subset and based on the
majority of the participant's interests, usually that ends up as an area
specific cluster.
​

> I think he was talking about WG areas but these are subject to change as

​[Dhruv]: The activity of making a subset agenda based on the interests and
then finding WG champions who will attend the hub, etc cannot be started
until we have an agenda.
So as soon as IETF publishes a draft agenda, we can start Hub agenda
planning.  I understand the agenda can never be perfect and always subject
to change, in spite of that IMHO having a draft agenda early would help.

Regards,
Dhruv

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From: Alia Atlas <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2016 09:15:09 -0400

Hi Christian, Dhruv, Vinayak, & all,

Interesting.  In Boston, we have tried doing some remote hubs during the
last 2 IETFs.  This has been primarily routing related WGs and hosted at
Juniper in Westford.   While they're public, I think most of the attendance
has been from Juniper folks, because they are there, hear about it more
easily, and are more interested.

In addition, we've had a couple get-togethers in Cambridge - one to
celebrate Scott Bradner's retirement and another social lunch.   We're
trying to pull together a meet-up with a few short technical presentations
and then potentially dinner afterwards.

In this area, we have a good number of experienced IETFers but reaching out
to pull new people in is more challenging.  It's also not completely clear
what will excite others enough to come to an event.  The social lunch did
have lively discussion, including of course IETF tech topics.

I'm thinking that focusing on remote hubs during IETF isn't as useful for
us, because a lot of the active folks are at IETF and the time-zone
differences are hard.

I'm also wondering about identifying/asking for community organizers to
focus on planning a few events (1 or 2 between IETFs) and think about how
to get the word out.

It sounds like this is a different approach, though very similar in some
ways of trying to add talks and interaction.

Thoughts?
Alia

On Fri, Oct 7, 2016 at 4:12 PM, Christian O'Flaherty <[email-masked]>
wrote:

>         Some hubs were meetings with an introduction/presentation and then
> the WG session (sometimes with local explanations and discussions in
> parallel)
>         Some hubs were organized for IETF promotion and the WG session
> itself was less important (more local activities)
>         Sometimes (in Brazil) they were organized as remote "IETF
> meetings” were the students had a WG to attend in each slot.
> There were hubs that failed because remote participation was impossible
> (low quality) and they did something else.
>
> We’ve been using them for IETF engagement so they’re usually not
> experienced IETFers, mostly students and professors, some network
> operators. I’m not aware of developers but some students can count as such.
>
> >
> Please don’t consider our experiences as “best practice”. We do have
> completely different needs and objectives for remote hubs in our region.
>
> Christian
>
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Alia

---

From: Vinayak Hegde <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2016 10:57:56 +0530

Replies inline.

> and then potentially dinner afterwards.

We have had a couple of themed get-togethers on IoT. There have also been a
few presentations by active IETFers in a few relevant networking
conferences. We are trying to add more structure and make it easier to
voulnteer and have more meetups.

> In this area, we have a good number of experienced IETFers but reaching
> out to pull new people in is more challenging.  It's also not completely
> clear what will excite others enough to come to an event.  The social lunch
> did have lively discussion, including of course IETF tech topics.
>

I think the remote hubs which work best when there is a time difference of
less than 4 hours (like Berlin). European IETFs work best for remote hubs
(As they coincide with work or after-work hours).

> ways of trying to add talks and interaction.

LACNIC has been doing regular webinar to raise awareness. That is something
we want to emulate in our region.

>>         Some hubs were meetings with an introduction/presentation and
>> then the WG session (sometimes with local explanations and discussions in
>> parallel)
>> > Personally, I'm brainstorming a bit about what might be useful to try
>> in the Boston Hub and how much to push or encourage structure.  It feels
>> like some can be quite useful.
>>