Subject: IETF Plenary Discussions

From: Danny McPherson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:53:28 -0700

Russ, Olaf, et al,
I was serious in my recommendation to experiment with limiting
question (comment) time at the microphone at plenaries.  I believe
it'll not only help mere mortals pay more attention, but will also
encourage those folks that have questions or comments to be more
concise, thereby keeping the audience better engaged.

I honestly mean no disrespect and appreciate the wealth of
institutional  knowledge that's on hand and frequently shared,
I just believe that it'd be more effective use of such precious
time (and encourage more discussions on this list :-).

-danny

---

From: Stephan Wenger <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:00:08 +0900

+1
Stephan

On 11/11/09 7:53 PM, "Danny McPherson" <[email-masked]> wrote:

> _______________________________________________
> Ietf mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

---

From: Russ Housley <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:56:45 -0500

I did not take the comment as disrespectful.  A timer might be a very 
good experiment.

Russ

---

From: Jari Arkko <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:30:55 +0900

Individuals taking a long time to talk either on the mike or responding 
on the stage :-) is one problem.

At times I wonder if a bigger issue is how long certain topics are 
discussed. I'm sorry but I just can't get excited about labeling of 
standards track RFCs, or even about how to get early review from the 
IESG on documents that advance. The issues are the same as they are for 
all other documents. If we want early review, get the document to the 
IESG and have us provide feedback in some documented manner.

I'm curious why we end up discussing this stuff in the administrative 
plenaries. I do not believe we have run out of other things to discuss. 
For instance, we could have talked about the direction of the v6 
transition work in the face of an ever growing set of proposals only 
slightly different from each other. Or how the IESG handled some BOFs, 
or the controversies that we have in a number of working groups. Or how 
the IETF should organize work around some emerging new topics.

Did we NOT discuss these topics because we had nothing to say, or 
because we had been exhausted by the standards ladder discussion?

Jari

---

From: Tony Hansen <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:11:13 -0500

Didn't Harald put up a timer sometimes during open mike?

	Tony Hansen

---

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:20:54 +0900

i am remembering that this is correct. i have a faint memory that the timer 
might have been per topic (so you cut off the followups and moved to the 
next question), at least once or twice.

i have a faint memory of a lot of things. harald? :-)

spencer

---

From: Scott Brim <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:46:13 +0900

> Didn't Harald put up a timer sometimes during open mike?

See attached ...

Time
Remaining

0:00

---

From: Olaf Kolkman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:19:10 +0900

During previous technical sessions I mailed an announcement about the technical plenary and in those announcements I've asked something along the lines of:

> If you consider asking a question during the open-microphone session it
> would be helpful to send that question to the IAB<[email-masked]> in advance.
> In that way we may be able to think about the problem and answer your
> question effectively. Note that sending in a question is _not_ a
> requirement for asking one. 

I believe that submitting questions in advance will help to get concise questions asked (because some thought went into phrasing them) and get pointed answers (because some thought went into answering them). In fact the questions may be shared by the larger group and not just the individual opinions of the folk that are happen to be on stage.

FWIW, in the sessions I had asked this questions nobody walked up during the microphone. I just forgot to add the paragraph in this weeks announcement.

--Olaf

________________________________________________________ 

Olaf M. Kolkman                        NLnet Labs
                                       Science Park 140, 
http://www.nlnetlabs.nl/               1098 XG Amsterdam

---

From: Eric Rescorla <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:14:45 +0200

At Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:56:45 -0500,
> I did not take the comment as disrespectful.  A timer might be a very 

And indeed used to be common practice.

-Ekr

---

From: "Martin J. Dürst" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:47:15 +0900

My understanding is that these days, most WG and BOF meetings have 
somebody watching jabber and bringing up comments from there to the mic. 
Also, jabber scribing seems to be quite popular, complementing the audio 
channel (which this time, as reported elsewhere, was excellent).

What about jabber support (both scribing and picking up 
questions/comments) for the plenary? Was this just never considered, or 
has it been considered and rejected?

Regards,    Martin.

-- 
#-# Martin J. Dürst, Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-# http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp   mailto:[email-masked]

---

From: Alexandru Petrescu <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:24:18 +0100

Martin J. Dürst a écrit :
> somebody watching jabber and bringing up comments from there to the 
> mic. Also, jabber scribing seems to be quite popular, complementing 
> the audio channel (which this time, as reported elsewhere, was 
> excellent).
> 
> questions/comments) for the plenary? Was this just never considered, 
> or has it been considered and rejected?

Well I have seen once (San Diego was that?) during the Plenary a
professional ("court") scriber on jabber, with a special keyboard, I was
impressed: speed, precision, efficiency.

Live jabber scribing, if done well, is extremely useful not only for
remote attendees but even for people in the physical room: names of
speakers can be seen (I heard this IETF has badge readers to display
names - but I doubt it's fast enough, I believe it slow), foreign
speakers read and understand better what's being said on mike, etc.

Live jabber scribing also maintains people (who cared to join the jabber
room) more concentrated on the meeting itself, while still watching the
laptop screen.

Two or three virtual rooms?  Usually there's only one virtual room
reserved for a meeting on jabber; however, there are at least two
different activities on jabber: (1) scribing and (2) discussing about
the ongoing meeting.  Sometimes there is (3) people specifically ask to
relay messages on the mike.

For the plenary, I have seen sometimes people setting up an additional
chat room, because the jabber room was too crowded and not fast enough
for some fast and very humourous remarks.

I think also that, in general, for IETF, we may need a code of
practice/conduct/rules for behaving on jabber rooms.  There are some
established practices I have seen.  E.g. recently I've seen a scribe
asking jabber participants to prefix their comment with <mic> if they
want it relayed on mike, which I find very useful.  I for myself try to
follow a common practice when jabber scribing: mark slide advance and
title, scribe only the comments not the presentation, use name acronyms
like AP for Alexandru Petrescu, etc.

Some times the practice is different.

Different people use different practice.  When the same practice is
used, scribing and mike relaying is easier.  For example, last time
scribing a fellow scriber helped me with the names following my  way of
abbreviating names, which I found extremeley useful.

Some people don't consider useful the way I scribe, because I tend to
scribe every word being said; and some Chairs prefer to have already the
synthesis of the message exchange done on the log - it's easier for them
when building the "official" minutes.  I.e. I scribe "AP: bit 1 must be
0; BR: no, bit 0 must be 1", whereas the minutes builder prefers to see
something like "AP and BR discussed about bits and values".

Some other people like the detailed jabber logs.

I never knew exactly what to do as jabber scribe, I just follow instinct.

But I believe these could be discussed in order to have a more efficient
jabber chat use - not only for Plenary, but for all meetings.

I love audio, I love jabber - without it my attendance would be reduced
to 0.

Alex

---

From: Lars Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:13:21 -0800

FWIW, this source is my hacked up version of the original that commented out a bunch of stuff I don't need when I use this. YMMV. (And thanks to the guys who originally put this together! It's been helpful many times.)

Lars

On 2009-11-11, at 18:46, Scott Brim wrote:

> <discussion-timer.html><ATT00001..txt>

---

From: Harald Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:21:38 +0100

Spencer Dawkins wrote:
> i am remembering that this is correct. i have a faint memory that the 
> timer might have been per topic (so you cut off the followups and 
> moved to the next question), at least once or twice.
>
Both experiments were run - at one stage, we ran a 2-minute 
participation timer and a ~20-minute topic timer - this had the 
additional twist that we had one mike for raising new topics and 2 mikes 
for commenting on the current topic.

Quite an overengineered scenario, I think; my clearest memory of that 
session was the guy who stood at the "topic" mike quietly for 20 minutes 
waiting to say "thank you for all the good stuff we got done".

Reaction to the timers was quite mixed, going all the way from love to 
hate; we never did a survey of the participants afterwards, I think. We 
probably should have.

                   Harald

>
> spencer
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tony Hansen" <[email-masked]>
>>> I did not take the comment as disrespectful.  A timer might be a 
>>> very good experiment.
>>>
>>> Russ
>>>
>>>

---

From: Harald Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:24:06 +0100

> I believe that submitting questions in advance will help to get concise questions asked (because some thought went into phrasing them) and get pointed answers (because some thought went into answer…
Perhaps we should look into http://moderator.appspot.com/ ?

---

From: Bob Hinden <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:12:00 -0800

>
>
> Reaction to the timers was quite mixed, going all the way from love  
> to hate; we never did a survey of the participants afterwards, I  
> think. We probably should have.

I was one of the folks who "hated" it.  I view the open mikes as the  
time for the community to speak to the leadership (IESG, IAB, and now  
the IAOC).  IMHO a timer sends the message that the I* does't want to  
listen to the community.

Note, I don't like the long rants either, but in this case the cure is  
worse than the disease.

Bob

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:56:24 +1300

On 2009-11-17 09:12, Bob Hinden wrote:
>> hate; we never did a survey of the participants afterwards, I think.
>> We probably should have.
> 

I agree that the I* should listen to the community, but then the community
should regulate itself. Maybe we need a new tradition - something like a
polite hum when someone has been ranting for long enough, and a loud hum
when they have been ranting for too long?

    Brian

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:08:43 -0900

> when they have been ranting for too long?

I can think of a few people who I think have been
ranting too long as soon as they step up to the
mike.  So, I think it's probably a mistake to turn
plenaries into a techie version of "The Gong Show" -
we shouldn't be making it easier to silence people
with unpopular or annoying views.  At least putting
a time limit on speeches at the mike is basically
(but not perfectly) non-discriminatory.

Melinda

---

From: Danny McPherson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:23:17 -0700

> (but not perfectly) non-discriminatory.

Yep, and as I noted, it helps to encourage folks to
organize their thoughts and be more concise in their
questions or statements for the benefit of the community,
AND the I*.

-danny

---

From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:39:18 +0100

As a life-long fan of the Gong Show, I think it'd be cool to have a big 
Gong on the dias, where perhaps after a bunch of loud hums, an AD or IAB 
member finally satisfies the audience.  This could happen sooner or 
later, depending on whether we're talking about topic (1) "NATs", (2) 
"The standards process", or (3) "Venue location".

But perhaps there's another approach that won't be quite so, well, 
base.  To me, if someone wants more than 2 minutes to make a point, 
perhaps that person should request a short agenda slot.  Here's a little 
process experiment: why not slot 20 minutes for such time at one of the 
plenaries, allowing for a 5 minute presentation and 5 minute 
discussion?  NANOG has been doing something like this- the Lightning 
presos.  You could even imagine someone carrying over a topic from this 
IETF discussion list or the previous meeting.  This gives people an 
opportunity to collect their thoughts, perhaps even post a draft, and 
then give a quick summary of it.

Some would say that the moment may have passed, and that decisions will 
be taken.  But 2 minutes is more than enough time for someone to say 
"-1" or "+1", or to make a very brief point as to why someone should be 
"-1" or "+1".

Eliot

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:15:15 +1300

In fact, lightning talks are SOP at most operator group meetings.
I think that would be an excellent experiment.

    Brian

---

From: Lisa Dusseault <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:54:50 -0800

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 12:15 PM, Brian E Carpenter <
[email-masked]> wrote:

> I agree, and in fact I've suggested lightning talks too; I think it tilts
community discussion towards identifying problems and solutions (or
educating) rather than asking the "leadership" for solutions which they're
not always able to provide unilaterally.   I think where the IESG got hung
up on actually planning lightning talks was on identifying a moderator who
is familiar with the format enough to run the talks, plus personable and
lively enough to keep things moving.  Up 'til now I haven't volunteered to
run such talks, but I do so now, still hoping somebody better than me can be
found.

The format I liked from ApacheCon, with a very similar model used at
DjangoCon, was to take names from those who wanted to talk for 5 minutes, up
to the start of the talks, then pull those names out of a hat until the hour
had been used up.   The 5 minutes was very strictly enforced with a giant
visible countdown, and there was <30sec allowed for the next speaker to come
up (therefore no slides).

Lisa

---

From: Russ Housley <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:20:56 -0500

We have a hard time getting someone to go the minutes.  I'd be 
pleased to do jabber if there was a volunteer for the typing.

Russ

At 04:47 AM 11/13/2009, Martin J. Dürst wrote:
>the audio channel (which this time, as reported elsewhere, was excellent).
>