Subject: [Manycouches] Notes from manycouches meeting with IESG - 20 July 2017

From: Dan York <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 18:51:08 +0000

Here are some notes I took from the meeting this week.  Comments, feedback and other notes are definitely welcome.

Dan

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Joint meeting of the "manycouches" team with the IESG
Date: 20 July 2017, 9-10am CEST

Actions:
- Dan York to create first draft of document describing overall issues and situation
- Greg Wood to relay info about other past virtual meetings he is aware of from other organizations
- Benoit Claise to send Dan his thoughts on efficient virtual meetings (DONE)

On Wednesday, 20 July 2017, the members of the "manycouches" design team met in the room where the IESG was meeting and IESG members also participated in the discussion.

Stephen Farrell led the conversation.

An initial conversation was about the scope of the effort.  Are we:

1. looking at how to have a *completely* virtual meeting? (someone said a "mega-virtual-meeting")

2. looking at how to have an *emergency* virtual meeting? (example: an earthquake happens in the host city a week before the meeting is to take place)

The sense I took was that we are to explore the issues that could be involved with either of these scenarios, with no commitment toward either.  A potential outcome is that the work might lead to experiments that could expand virtual participation with future physical meetings.

An obvious difference is that in an "emergency" situation we might want to replicate the existing meeting schedule as that has already been hammered out.

Issues

Major issues identified include:

1. Timezones!
2. Current structure with many meeting sessions at the same time.
3. Hallway conversations.
4. Side meetings and conversations.
- often times groups meet at the IETF venue and then go off and work on a project
5. Serendipity  - discovering other people.

Structure

A structure was suggested by Greg Wood for how to think about the topics (to which I have added a few points):

1. Technical
- including NOC and hallway conversations
2. Program
- what does the structure look like?  Do we have meetings over 24 hours?  Is it still in a "week"?
3. User journey
- what is the user experience for such a meeting?
4. Administrative
- what is impact on centralized resources such as support staff?
- impact on funding?
5. Security
- ex. how do you ensure that a DDoS doesn't take down the entire meeting?
- (this could be seen as a subset of "Technical" but I think it merits it's own area as it may be more than technical)

Current experience

There was discussion about the current experience with attending meetings remotely. Some of the points raised:

- It is common for remote participants to ONLY go to meetings of direct interest to them, particularly if there is a large timezone difference.  What is lost is the inadvertent cross-pollination that happens when people drift into other working groups in which they do not normally participate.

- Remote participants often *can* join in multiple sessions at the same time by, for instance, running multiple instances of Meetecho in different browsers.

Other discussion points

Other points raised in the discussion:

- There was discussion about timezones and how to identify the best time for a working group to meet.  One idea was that a group might identify where its main leaders were clustered and choose the timezone based on that. (Although concern was this might feed into limiting participation from other areas.)

- For a planned virtual meeting the program would not necessarily be limited by the traditional schedule. It would be possible that sessions could meet over the full 24 hours of the day.

- The idea was mentioned that perhaps the planned virtual meeting could span more than a week, i.e. it could continue over a couple of weeks or indeed be ongoing.  The counterpoint was that keeping it within a week gave a focused block of time that people could allocate for participation in the virtual event.

- Alia Atlas asked about how we take advantage of being virtual. How could we make it more conversational? How can it be better than a physical meeting?

- Lou Berger asked about how we pay for it.

- The question of deadlines (for drafts, agendas, etc.) was raised as something to be explored.

- A question was asked about how we could effectively trial any of these ideas.

- There was discussion about other examples of "all-virtual" meetings that have happened and the need to explore those examples to understand what can be learned.  Greg Wood offered to research some of the other examples he was aware of.

- Benoit Claise noted that meetings mail when we don't have good coordinators and noted the need for training for coordinators.

- Several participants including Alissa Cooper and Deb Brungard expressed concern to be clear *why* we are doing this effort and the need for a clear problem statement.

- A couple of participants voiced opinions that I would summarize as:  replacing a physical meeting would be pretty much impossible.

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AFTER THE MEETING

Benoit sent the following points as things he thought made for a good interim meeting:

- Focus on a couple of topics, not all
- Live cycle document: no early => finishing document
- Identify key contributors involved => this decides the TZ
- Identify a good call facilitator

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In other meetings this week I heard comments that pertain to this topic:

- Inclusivity - how do you bring new people into sessions?  how do people learn of side meetings?

- Mentoring - how do mentors work in a virtual meeting?

- How do you incorporate some concept of "unstructured" time where people can meet and connect?

- Mark Nottingham made a statement in a session that the purpose of meeting in person is to get to know people and to socialize so that you have a shared mind space when you are then working on projects.

--
Dan York
Senior Content Strategist, Internet Society
[email-masked]<mailto:[email-masked]>   +1-802-735-1624
Jabber: [email-masked]<mailto:[email-masked]>
Skype: danyork   http://twitter.com/danyork

http://www.internetsociety.org/