Subject: Re: Formal IESG Teleconference WebEx and Dial-in Information

From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 08:55:32 +0200

On Thu, Sep 11, 2014 at 05:17:57AM -0700,
 IESG Secretary <[email-masked]> wrote 
 a message of 69 lines which said:

> Topic: IESG Formal Telechat
> Date: Thursday, September 18, 2014
> Time: 8:30 am, PDT (San Francisco, GMT-07:00)

The IETF being supposed to be an international organization, and the
event having no physical location, times should be announced *only* in
UTC.

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From: Pete Resnick <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 17:34:36 -0500

On 9/12/14 1:55 AM, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
>   IESG Secretary<[email-masked]>  wrote

Let's be clear: The IESG telechat is always held on a Thursday at 8:30am 
US Pacific Time. When it is summer in the US (more or less), that's 
15:30 UTC. When it's winter in the US (more or less), that's 16:30 UTC. 
And the time of the meeting completely depends on the the US Daylight 
Saving Time rules in effect at the time. Announcing it in *only* UTC 
loses information, because you wouldn't be aware that the time is based 
on US Pacific Time (even though for any single meeting, UTC is enough 
information to know when that meeting is scheduled). Adding UTC to the 
announcement would be useful.

Now, we could change things and schedule it in UTC instead. That makes 
it a moving target for everyone instead of just some. Maybe that's 
reasonable. (And when the IESG finally has members from east Asia or 
Oceania, which it surely will some day, the schedule will surely have to 
be revisited.) But I think given the current schedule, announcing it 
*only* in UTC is the wrong thing to do.

pr

-- 
Pete Resnick<http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. - +1 (858)651-4478

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From: Tim Wicinski <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 19:50:59 -0400

> *only* in UTC is the wrong thing to do.

How about listing it in Pacific Time, and list the UTC converted time 
and including that as well?

tim

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From: Randy Bush <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 12:46:00 +0900

[ OP not in To: as they were just trying to be nice ]

[ normally i would just hit delete, but this week i had to deal with
  "let's not hold a meeing in foo, it is too difficult." ]

> and including that as well?

how about listing it in WGST (greenland) and list the UTC as well?

what don't we get about *international* organization?  

it's not as if we're being asked to take a train or anything horrifying.
or to simultaneously publish internet-drafts in french or in majority
languages such as mandarin and arabic.

randy

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From: Pete Resnick <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 18:31:18 -0500

>> and including that as well?

A perfectly fine plan for any given meeting. For any given meeting, we 
could also list it *only* in UTC if we wanted to, but....

> how about listing it in WGST (greenland) and list the UTC as well?

A perfectly bad plan, because if you put in your calendar program "every 
two weeks at 13:30 WGST", come next month you will show up at the wrong 
time for the Oct 30 telechat.

Pacific Time (and not coincidentally also Eastern Time, Central Time, 
and Mountain Time) gives you actual information, because the time of the 
meeting *does* change during the year relative to UTC (and WGST and 
loads of other time zones). As I said earlier, noting somewhere that the 
meeting always occurs relative to Pacific Time *is* useful information.

> what don't we get about *international* organization?

Again, we can change the meeting to always be fixed in UTC and move it 
twice a year for everyone in a place that does summer time. Fine with 
me. Equal shared suffering. But given the current scheduling of the 
meeting, stating the schedule is *not* anti-international.

pr

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From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 13:18:02 +0300

We are an international organisation. And that is why the time is listed in UTC.

The message does list another time as well, in fact does so first. It also lists a local phone number. Another IETF meeting (IAB) uses a template that I have found very useful:

> IAB Business Meeting
> Wed 2014-09-10
> 
> 0700-0830 PDT
> 1000-1130 EDT
> 1400-1530 UTC
> 1600-1730 Germany, Switzerland
> 1700-1830 Finland
> 2200-2330 China

That is, it lists a few likely time zones for people for convenience. In this case the known timezones of people who are at least going to be on the call. I’m going to ask the secretariat to do something similar for the IESG calls, because it helps me and other participants to do their TZ math. I know I can always click on a link to find out, do the math, or use the Internet to find out local phone numbers. But sadly there are a few situations where I might be on a call without Internet connectivity.

By the way, notice when I said *for convenience*. We are an international organisation but please do not ask us to remove information that is convenient for many participants just out of principle. And I think we have bigger problems in the Internet to solve than the announcement format for IESG calls :-) Unless, of course, we made all items local to Finland, which I think would be a significant Internet improvement :-)

And now, I am going to attempt move the discussion to a direction that I think would be better use of our time. I saw a few participants on the previous call. Anyone on this list who joined? Did you find it useful? Or if you did not join, do you find it useful that you can, if you want to follow a particular topic? This time we had a record quick call, by the way, so there wasn’t that much actual discussion. But the different calls can be different in this respect. 

Jari

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From: Patrik Fältström <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 07:26:32 -0400

On 17 sep 2014, at 06:18, Jari Arkko <[email-masked]> wrote:

> That is, it lists a few likely time zones for people for convenience.

What is important though is that either there are never ever errors in those calculations (which I have found in ICANN context not really be possible to live up to) OR people must understand that the UTC time is the correct one, and that there might be errors in the other time slots published.

   Patrik

---

From: Cyrus Daboo <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 10:52:24 -0400

Hi Jari,

--On September 17, 2014 at 1:18:02 PM +0300 Jari Arkko 
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> That is, it lists a few likely time zones for people for convenience. In
> this case the known timezones of people who are at least going to be on
> the call. I’m going to ask the secretariat to do something similar for
> the IESG calls, because it helps me and other participants to do their TZ
> math. I know I can always click on a link to find out, do the math, or
> use the Internet to find out local phone numbers. But sadly there are a
> few situations where I might be on a call without Internet connectivity.
>
> By the way, notice when I said *for convenience*. We are an international
> organisation but please do not ask us to remove information that is
> convenient for many participants just out of principle. And I think we
> have bigger problems in the Internet to solve than the announcement
> format for IESG calls :-) Unless, of course, we made all items local to
> Finland, which I think would be a significant Internet improvement :-)

>From a dog food perspective, do these messages include an iCalendar 
attachment with the event details? Is there an event calendar on a web 
server available for download as an iCalendar stream somewhere? (Sorry I 
don't get the emails so I can't check for myself).

As a proponent of iCalendar - a well established and successful IETF 
technology - I would like us to use it for all event announcements and the 
like. I know the tools folks have support for it for the main meetings, so 
some of the necessary pieces are available.

Also, with the backing of a good, reliable source of timezone data (see the 
new tzdist working group, and the IANA time zone database), the iCalendar 
data becomes the definitive source for the event time and avoids people 
having to do mental arithmetic with UTC offsets. Also, the new Calext 
working group will hopefully be working on extensions to iCalendar that 
include a new CONFERENCE property to make it easier to specify "machine 
readable" conference data that clients can use to auto-dial on the user's 
behalf.

Oh, and by the way, if we really want to go the whole way and become truly 
"international", then perhaps we should also consider having recurring 
meetings repeat using a non-Gregorian calendar scale - also something that 
Calext will be working on :-)

-- 
Cyrus Daboo

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 07:58:55 -0700

On 9/17/2014 7:52 AM, Cyrus Daboo wrote:
> technology - I would like us to use it for all event announcements and
> the like. I know the tools folks have support for it for the main
> meetings, so some of the necessary pieces are available.

+1

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net

---

From: "John Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 17 Sep 2014 15:08:55 -0000

>> meetings, so some of the necessary pieces are available.

If it could help us get the time zones right, that would be fabulous.

I've pretty much given up trying to explain that "PST" is not the
local time in San Francisco in the summer, it really does matter, and
Paris is not always nine hours ahead of them, even among technically
savvy people who should know better.

The most reliable I've found at this point is to ask where they are
and the local time the meeting will start, so if the local time and
UTC disagree, it's invariably the UTC that's wrong.

R's,
John

PS: It does not help that products from a large vendor in the Pacific
time zone send out invites that proudly announce that they don't get
the summer time changes right.

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From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 18:16:00 +0300

Cyrys,

> do these messages include an iCalendar 
> attachment with the event details? Is there an event calendar on a web server available for download as an iCalendar stream somewhere? (Sorry I don't get the emails so I can't check for myself).

No, but that’s a good question. And that is something that is changing a bit, because it used to be the case that only ADs participated these calls, and we got our calendar event entry for the whole series at the beginning of an IETF cycle. (And getting that only once is still important, at least for me…) But now we are inviting more people, and adding a calendar entry to the call would be very reasonable. One way or the other. Let me see if I can set that up.

Jari

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 11:09:21 +1200

On 18/09/2014 03:16, Jari Arkko wrote:
> No, 

>From my observations, the WebEx tools seem to automatically generate
an .ics file. Putting the current .ics file at http://www.ietf.org/iesg/
shouldn't be hard, and would work even for people who aren't on the
relevant -announce list or a calendar feed.

There's also an "Add to My Calendar" button on the relevant WebEx page,
which is in fact a pointer to the .ics file (which is a repeating one,
so you'd only need to import it once for the whole year).

   Brian

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From: S Moonesamy <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 09:33:53 -0700

Hi Jari,
At 03:18 17-09-2014, Jari Arkko wrote:
>format for IESG calls :-) Unless, of course, we made all items local 
>to Finland, which I think would be a significant Internet improvement :-)

The cat video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKffm2uI4dk ) might be 
fun to listen to. :-)

>And now, I am going to attempt move the discussion to a direction 
>that I think would be better use of our time. I saw a few 
>participants on the previous call. Anyone on this list who joined? 
>Did you find it useful? Or if you did not join, do you find it 
>useful that you can, if you want to follow a particular topic? This 
>time we had a record quick call, by the way, so there wasn't that 
>much actual discussion. But the different calls can be different in 
>this respect.

I forgot that today's call was relevant to me.  I got a DISCUSS from 
Richard (not a problem).  Here's my experience.  I was prompted to 
download a WebEx Add-on (not a problem).  There isn't a dial-in 
number for me (not a problem).  The audio was clear.  It's useful to 
follow a telechat as it provides a sense of how an IESG Evaluation 
actually works.

I'll say two words to Stephen: "Thank you".

Regards,
S. Moonesamy