Subject: Re: this is insane.

From: Jeffrey Altman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Dec 98 13:47:25 EST

I would suggest that the IETF take reservations for each working group
meeting at the time of registration.  Chairpeople when submitting
their request for a session can include a list of active participants
to be placed at the top of the list.  This will provide the IETF with
a better idea of the number of people interested in a particular
session for planning purposes and provide the ability to limit a
session to a particular list if a large enough room cannot be found.

I also think the idea of holding meetings in less than desireable
tourist locations is a good one.  

    Jeffrey Altman * Sr.Software Designer * Kermit-95 for Win32 and OS/2
                 The Kermit Project * Columbia University
              612 West 115th St #716 * New York, NY * 10025
  http://www.kermit-project.org/k95.html * [email-masked]

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From: "Perry E. Metzger" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Dec 1998 15:33:01 -0500

> tourist locations is a good one.  

I am dead serious in suggesting that Ottowa in winter, Texas in
summer, etc., is the approach we should be taking. The worst possible
locations that have good conference facilities. Any places that have
comfort and tourist value should be avoided.

Perry

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From: "Perry E. Metzger" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Dec 1998 15:33:01 -0500

Perry

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From: "John W. Noerenberg" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Dec 1998 13:07:41 -0800

> session to a particular list if a large enough room cannot be found.

I've found the number of attendees of the previous meeting has been a 
reasonably good predictors of attendance for the next meeting 
(ignoring the obvious problem with 1st-time meetings).

Perhaps a reservation list would be self-policing to some degree -- 
if attendees don't consciously decide beforehand they will attend a 
session, they are less likely to decide to attend it "on the spur of 
the moment."  The problem would be inducing enough compliance to make 
the reservation lists meaningful.  The obvious solution - a 
gatekeeper at the door checking off names - is onerous from a number 
of points of view.  Another problem is that the agenda is rarely set 
at the time many people register (especially since the dearth of 
meeting site hotel rooms at recent meetings has fostered the reaction 
of registering within minutes of seeing the open registration 
message).  So it is hard to see how reservations at the time of 
registration would be possible.

john noerenberg
[email-masked]
  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
  All actions are wrought by the qualities of nature only.
  The self, deluded by egoism, thinketh, "I am the doer."
  -- Bhagavad Gita
  ----------------------------------------------------------------------

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From: "John W. Noerenberg" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Dec 1998 13:07:41 -0800

john noerenberg
[email-masked]

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From: "John W. Noerenberg" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Dec 1998 13:21:04 -0800

At 3:33 PM -0500 12/9/98, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> Any places that have

It certainly makes it easier to say to my boss, "I'm going to the 
IETF, but I absolutely am not going to have any fun!"

Of course, he already thinks I'm nuts most of the time.

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From: "John W. Noerenberg" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 Dec 1998 13:21:04 -0800

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From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Dec 1998 17:36:05 -0500

> comfort and tourist value should be avoided.

this reminds me of the suggestions that people should have to pay
for sending email (on a per-recipient,per-message basis) in order 
to discourage spam.  sure it would work, but it would also remove a 
lot of the utility of email.

it's not at all clear that we are any worse off for holding this conference 
in Orlando.  just as the location might be attractive for people who 
might want to attend without doing work, it might also be attractive for
the same people to skip these boring meetings and go to the magic kingdom.
ietf meetings are inherently boring to those who don't want to do the work.
we have our own built-in defense mechanism against goers.  it's not perfect
but it is operating and does have a beneficial effect. 

the fact that a single meeting room is crowded does not mean that there 
are too many "goers" at the meeting, or that there are too many people 
are coming to IETF.  it just means that the working group chair didn't
provide an accurate estimate of the attendance when requesting a meeting
slot.

IETF does have scaling problems, but we won't solve them by knee-jerk
reactions. nor does it help to guess at solutions without first making
a concerted effort to really understand what is going on.

Keith

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From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 09 Dec 1998 17:36:05 -0500

Keith

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From: Jon Crowcroft <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1998 07:06:14 +0100

In message <v0410360fb2949329e010@[129.46.172.254]>, "John W. Noerenberg" typed
:

 >>> meeting at the time of registration.  
 
at some point in the past, there was a tacit agreement that a WG could
have observers (i cant recall when....) but it seems to me the idea
has gone awry - implementors should be able to use the i-d, rfc,
working code examples, as in the past, and not have to be _in the WG
meeting_ unless they are contributors......why did we get into some
sort of performance art event where there are 12 good folks and true
and a public gallery of 100 rogues watching? in  a BOF, yes maybe, but
not in a protocol design group -

it would be interesting to use the ietf  registration list and grep
thru all the WG mail archives and rfc and i-d drafts and see how many
people are registered who never wrote a thing - "we know who you are"
....

 cheers

   jon

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From: Jon Crowcroft <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1998 07:06:14 +0100

cheers

   jon

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From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1998 03:09:41 -0500

>comfort and tourist value should be avoided.

We have been to tourist and non-tourist places for a long time. The thing
that has been statistically significant, if anything, is that meetings in
silicon valley spike in attendance, and (until Munich) European meetings
were relatively smaller. Otherwise, location has made no statistically
noticeable difference.

Think about it this way. If you grep the internet draft directory and do
some string manipulation, you will find that there are about 2500 different
email addresses tat have valid domain names (A or MX record) found in
currently posted internet drafts. On average, each person that comes to an
IETF meeting contributes to one or two internet drafts. Now, either that
means that we have a small number of very prolific people that like to name
everyone they know as co-authors and the rest of us are tourists, or that
the people that come are all experts in something, it just may not be in
the topic of the session they are sitting in. I prefer to think the latter
might be the case.

Now, what happens when someone who is not an expert in your work but is
expert in something else looks at your work? I claim your work gets some
amount of review from a fresh perspective, one you just might learn
something from.

I suspect that a reservation model makes more sense - chairs reserve seats
in the front of the room for folks who plan to lead a discussion or make a
presentation, or who are active contributors on the list. And if the rest
of us have trouble making it in, well, it's not that the Secretariat isn't
trying to accommodate us. It's just that there are a lot of us to
accommodate. To date, I don't know that anyone has tried that.

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From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1998 03:09:41 -0500

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From: RL Bob Morgan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1998 12:35:17 -0500 (EST)

On Thu, 10 Dec 1998, Fred Baker wrote:

> presentation, or who are active contributors on the list.

I have seen any number of sessions where active contributors were
clustered at the back, where the power outlets happened to be.  This makes
them less able to participate in the session, obviously an undesirable
effect.

I suggest that providing power outlets at these reserved seats would help
with this problem, though it would obviously make these seats more
attractive to the merely power-hungry (as it were).

In fact I think it's a shame, given the high laptop-density of IETF
attendees, that power outlets in the meeting rooms are so hard to find,
and that we have to spend so much time during sessions fiddling with plugs
and extension cords.  I suggest that the Secretariat invest in some power
strips to put in the meeting rooms for the week, or work with the hotels
to put them in.

 - RL "Bob"

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From: RL Bob Morgan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1998 12:35:17 -0500 (EST)

- RL "Bob"

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From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1998 13:18:39 -0500

> people are registered who never wrote a thing - "we know who you are"

AFAIK, my name is not on any draft, but I take strong exception to the
implication that because "I never wrote a thing", I don't belong, or
that because I'm an implementor, I have no business being involved in
defining the protocol.   As somebody pointed out in the malloc working
group this morning, this is the Internet *Engineering* Task Force.
We are not a bunch of professional standards politicians - we are
implementors.

I think what's operating here is actually a guilt factor - people who
come to IETF for the whole week feel obliged to go to sessions in
which they have some passing interest, in order to justify the expense
of being here.   We're all people with strong opinions, so if we show
up for such meetings, we wind up expressing opinions that often aren't
needed, and we certainly create clutter.

My approach to this, and one I think other IETF attendees would do
well to consider adopting, is that I don't attend working group
meetings unless I know I have something to contribute.  When I do
attend, I don't volunteer opinions if I haven't read the relevant
draft(s).  I don't sit in the front if I don't have anything to say.
I don't stand in the back either, because that might block access - I
find a place to sit in the middle, where there are often open seats
with laptops on them, or I sit on the floor on the edge, or stand
against a wall.

I think most people who show up for IETF have the best of intentions.
If we just show a little consideration and humility, I don't think we
need to resort to grepping through RFCs to see who's allowed to
participate.

			       _MelloN_

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From: Ted Lemon <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1998 13:18:39 -0500

_MelloN_

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From: "Matt Crawford" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1998 14:21:59 -0600

> which they have some passing interest,

I would love to be able to know the daily agenda before the time I
have to make travel arrangements, but this does not seem to be
feasible.

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From: "Matt Crawford" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1998 14:21:59 -0600

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From: Scott Lawrence <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1998 16:32:53 +0000

RL Bob Morgan wrote:

> strips to put in the meeting rooms for the week

Actually, I have often found it difficult in the poor acoustics of a large
room to understand what is being said because I was surrounded by people
very noisily typing throughout the meeting (when I got a laptop recently,
one of the primary criteria was that it have a no-click keyboard).  Some of
these people are taking notes (apparently without much editorial effort),
but some are working on drafts for other meetings or doing thier email or
something; it can be very disruptive.  I know that the noise of one person
typing is not much, but it isn't just one...

-- 
Scott Lawrence           Director of R & D        <[email-masked]>
Agranat Systems, Inc.  Embedded Web Technology   http://www.agranat.com/

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From: Scott Lawrence <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1998 16:32:53 +0000