Subject: Fix the Friday attendance bug: make the technical plenary the last IETF session, like it was before

From: Stanislav Shalunov <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:05:26 +0900

[I hope to raise this issue during the administrative plenary.   
Because I obviously won't have time at the microphone to present the  
full argument and because I might not get the chance at all, I'm  
writing something down and sending it out now.]

When you participated in a WG on any Friday during the past meetings,  
you probably noticed impaired attendance.  This becomes particularly  
visible for WG chairs, few of whom are thrilled to get a slot on Friday.

Friday is declared to be a real day, but the declaration is  
disregarded (rationally, as I'll explain) by a fraction of  
participants.  This makes Friday a defective day, making it rational  
for more people not to attend, creating a positive feedback loop  
making it more defective.

The fuzzy end bug wasn't always there.  When the IETF didn't have  
sessions on Friday, the technical plenary was the last thing that  
happened during each meeting for normal participants [1].  The  
plenaries have the largest attendance, so it put a very sharp stop to  
the IETF meeting.  When Friday sessions were added, there were few to  
begin with, so the end got fuzzy and the attendance problems began.

For some participants, it is rational to skip Friday in its present  
form.  Checking this meeting's agenda, Monday currently has 124 track- 
hours [2] worth of sessions.  (Tuesday-Thursday are similar full-day  
affairs for most people, even if differently structured because of the  
social and the plenaries.)  Friday currently has 29.5 track-hours  
worth of sessions, ~4.2 times less.  For a person who is only  
interested in a few sessions, there's a good chance that none of them  
will fall on Friday.  If the person judges that the relatively small  
probability of missing an interesting session (or, more precisely, the  
relatively small expected number of interesting sessions) that fall(s)  
on Friday, multiplied by the cost of missing a session, is smaller  
than the cost of an extra day of travel, it is rational for them not  
to attend Friday.  Repeating that Friday is a normal day is not going  
to change the calculation if Friday continues to be ~4.2 less valuable.

Once these participants choose to go home on Friday, the value of  
Friday is further depleted.  Not only there are fewer sessions on  
Friday, but they are not as well attended, creating a multiplier  
through a positive feedback loop.

The bug is easy to fix: we should restore the technical plenary to  
where it was before -- namely, to the very end of the IETF meeting for  
normal participants.

Put the technical plenary on Friday afternoon.  This will make it  
natural to increase the number of track-sessions on Friday.  This will  
restore a sharp end to the IETF, fixing the Friday bug.

A side effect of the fix is that it would increase the total number of  
available track-hours by about 15%, making scheduling easier for the  
next few meetings after implementation.

Here are some immediate, but invalid, objections that this proposal is  
prone to elicit:

"But nobody will come to the technical plenary Friday afternoon!" --
1. We did come to the technical plenary when it was the last thing on  
Thursday, and it was in the evening.
2. If people won't come to the technical plenary, they won't come to  
WG meetings.  If it's an unsuitable meeting time, we should not put  
WGs there.

"Can't we just make sure it's not the same groups that get put on  
Friday?" --
Zero-sum redistribution of pain pitting WGs against one another does  
not reduce total pain.  We can fix the bug instead of making everyone  
suffer equally.

"Can't we only put unimportant sessions, like second sessions and  
maybe these two session I personally don't like, on Friday?" --
No.  Friday started out with only non-technical sessions.  The first  
was IPR, if I recall.  The IETF needed more first-class technical  
track-hours, which is why they bled into Friday.  We have no plan to  
reduce the number of sessions.  Moving technical plenary to Friday  
afternoon would, instead of reducing the number of first-class hours,  
increase it, moving Friday closer to a full day.

"Can't people just book tickets after the agenda comes out?" --
This is not the answer for two reasons:
1. Agenda changes.
2. This replaces "expected number of interesting sessions that fall on  
Friday" with "number of interesting sessions that fall on Friday".   
Because the expected number was lower, the actual number will be lower  
on average, giving a similar aggregate effect.

We shouldn't suffer from the Friday bug and repeat "normal day"  
mantra.  We should fix the bug that detached the technical plenary  
from the end of the IETF meeting by moving it to the end again.

-- Stas

PS The WG that I cochair happened to get the short straw this meeting  
with several key contributors unable to attend, which triggered my  
thinking about how to fix the Friday bug, but this message is not  
about any particular WGs.  Again, we should not redistribute the pain  
or worry if it gets distributed evenly when we can simply remove it.

[1] "Normal participants" = {all participants} - {people who come for  
a single meeting or two} - {members of IESG, IAB, etc.}

[2] track-hours = sum_slots num_sessions*duration.  This is an  
imperfect proxy for person-hours, because it does not take into  
account number of attendees of the sessions.  (I don't have data on  
person-hours by day of the week.)  To partially mitigate, I avoided  
picking Tuesday-Thursday with the huge social event and the plenaries  
as baseline.

-- 
Stanislav Shalunov
BitTorrent Inc
[email-masked]

personal: http://shlang.com