Subject: BoF's in the Age of Covids

From: Michael Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 May 2020 15:51:13 -0700

It's been my impression that a substantial amount of the work for 
putting together BoF's, etc has been done loosely and informally usually 
in the setting of a meeting and drinking beers with others (aka bar 
BoF). Since we seem to be doing neither neither these days, from what I 
can tell this list is the closest to that in purpose. Yet since it's 
ietf-wide it includes lots of different areas and interests it's easy to 
see how the signal to noise ratio might get bad in a hurry. Often when 
you're poking around about a problem you really don't want to lay it out 
there when it's clearly not baked and makes no claims of the sort.

BoF's in particular are hard because you might know a few people who 
have been thinking about a problem, you have no good clue who else might 
be thinking about it as well, and who might be interested in it. With a 
bar BoF it is much easier to gauge interest given the number of people 
who show up, and the number of beers consumed.  I am not aware of any 
virtual analog to this, and I'm wondering whether this is going to 
become an issue if this pandemic drags on as is being contemplated.

There are almost certainly a host of other issues in a similar vein that 
I doubt has been a problem until suddenly it is.

Mike

---

From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 May 2020 00:59:58 +0200

On 2020-05-12, at 00:51, Michael Thomas <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> With a bar BoF it is much easier to gauge interest given the number of people who show up, and the number of beers consumed.  I am not aware of any virtual analog to this,

A non-WG mailing list is the closest digital analog [sic!] we have.
(Getting that has a lot more ceremony than the traditional bar BOF had.
That maybe needs to be adjusted down slightly now.
Garbage collection remains a problem.)

Of course, you can also go ahead and schedule "side meetings”, i.e., web conferences, but these happen entirely outside the shell of the IETF (yes, like bar BOFs, except that these are strongly linked to an actual IETF meeting by colocation).

Grüße, Carsten

---

From: Michael Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 May 2020 16:12:59 -0700

> Of course, you can also go ahead and schedule "side meetings”, i.e., web conferences, but these happen entirely outside the shell of the IETF (yes, like bar BOFs, except that these are strongly lin…
This is yet another aspect of what I've been calling the Water Cooler 
problem -- in this case I guess it's more properly called the Beer Keg 
Problem. I'm not sure if it has anything to do with ietf's core mission 
of making interoperable protocols, but it seems like it has a lot to do 
with ietf on an *operational* basis.

I wrote about this in a blog post a week or two ago if anybody's 
interested. 
https://rip-van-webble.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-water-cooler-problem.html

Not that it has anything useful to say about this particular 
manifestation...

Mike

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 May 2020 19:14:06 -0400

Michael Thomas <[email-masked]> wrote:
    > putting together BoF's, etc has been done loosely and informally
    > usually in the setting of a meeting and drinking beers with others (aka
    > bar BoF). Since we seem to be doing neither neither these days, from
    > what I can tell this list is the closest to that in purpose. Yet since
    > it's ietf-wide it includes lots of different areas and interests it's
    > easy to see how the signal to noise ratio might get bad in a

I agree that [email-masked] is a good starting point, but I think one needs to
take a bit of a shotgun to a half-dozen other MLs to let people know you are
thinking of something.  [email-masked] is not universally read, alas.
Also making use of Any-of-Other-Business section of other virtual interims to
talk briefly about things.   I wouldn't be afraid of babbling about such
things in the jabber, DURING (virtual) meetings, but also in hallway@

Our new tradition of "dispatch" areas is also a good thing.

People write drafts, and it might be that intentionally invoking Cunningham's
Law is a good idea.

    > it. With a bar BoF it is much easier to gauge interest given the number
    > of people who show up, and the number of beers consumed. 

agreed.

--
]               Never tell me the odds!                 | ipv6 mesh networks [
]   Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works        |    IoT architect   [
]     [email-masked]  http://www.sandelman.ca/        |   ruby on rails    [

---

From: Michael Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 May 2020 16:25:17 -0700

> things in the jabber, DURING (virtual) meetings, but also in hallway@

You mean wg ml's? Often that is the *last* place I'd want to bring 
something new up and from my experience the feeling is mutual :) And 
it's probably just as well that ietf@ is not universally participated in 
because it wouldn't scale if it became the new go-to place to do this.

Jabber or other forms of conferencing might be a vehicle for having the 
virtual bof, but it requires some sort of announcement. Iirc (it's been 
a while), these bar bofs are usually announced on a bulletin board where 
people can scan it for interesting stuff. So while bar bof's are 
informal, it's definitely in the ietf universe.

> Our new tradition of "dispatch" areas is also a good thing.
Dispatch areas?
> People write drafts, and it might be that intentionally invoking Cunningham's

Heh :)

Mike

---

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 May 2020 04:15:43 -0400

Michael Thomas <[email-masked]> wrote:
    >> Michael Thomas <[email-masked]> wrote: > It's been my impression that a
    >> substantial amount of the work for > putting together BoF's, etc has
    >> been done loosely and informally > usually in the setting of a meeting
    >> and drinking beers with others (aka > bar BoF). Since we seem to be
    >> doing neither neither these days, from > what I can tell this list is
    >> the closest to that in purpose. Yet since > it's ietf-wide it includes
    >> lots of different areas and interests it's > easy to see how the
    >> signal to noise ratio might get bad in a
    >>
    >> I agree that [email-masked] is a good starting point, but I think one
    >> needs to take a bit of a shotgun to a half-dozen other MLs to let
    >> people know you are thinking of something.  [email-masked] is not
    >> universally read, alas.  Also making use of Any-of-Other-Business
    >> section of other virtual interims to talk briefly about things.  I
    >> wouldn't be afraid of babbling about such things in the jabber, DURING
    >> (virtual) meetings, but also in hallway@

    > something new up and from my experience the feeling is mutual :)

I'm not suggesting trying to have the conversation there, but rather, that
it's an important place to find interested parties.  To be clear: it's for
the announcement.

--
Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>, Sandelman Software Works
 -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-

---

From: Behcet Sarikaya <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 May 2020 09:52:57 -0500

Hi,

I agree with Michael Thomas' points.
We may conclude that the Age of Covids will end up a very decreased BoF
activity in IETF simply because people's hands are tied.

Regards,
Behcet

---

From: Michael Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 May 2020 08:12:49 -0700

> it's an important place to find interested parties.  To be clear: it's for

Yeah, that smells suspiciously of spam to my taste. You're trying to get 
the attention of the usual suspects, but the problem has little if 
anything to do with the wg's. The bulletin board in the lobby is a much 
more neutral place since it is passively rather than actively alerting. 
Maybe a per-area bar-bof-alert mailing list? nicer would be to be able 
to send out the idea and create a chat room for it which was reaped if 
it goes unused for some period of time.

The long and short of this is that for an org so bolted at the hip to 
e-conversations, it's going to be interesting to find all of the places 
that we're dependent to meat-space.

Mike

---

From: Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 May 2020 21:16:06 -0500

FWIW,

> it goes unused for some period of time.

In meat-space, this was what we intended the HotRFC sessions on Sunday
nights of IETF week to be.

We didn't have HotRFC for IETF 107, and no one complained because we were
thrilled we could actually get all the BOFs, area sessions, and first-time
working groups scheduled, but if we're not going to have a face-to-face
session in 2020 (does anyone think we are?), it may be worth asking the
Aaron Falks of the world to think about what they need to run HotRFC
virtually, really, and whether that could be done more frequently than
three times per year.

I note that "how important is HotRFC for IETF 108?" was on the meeting
survey a couple of weeks ago - perhaps we got some helpful thoughts there,
too.

Best,

Spencer

---

From: Michael Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 May 2020 10:19:03 -0700

On 5/17/20 7:16 PM, Spencer Dawkins at IETF wrote:
> We didn't have HotRFC for IETF 107, and no one complained because we 
> were thrilled we could actually get all the BOFs, area sessions, and 
> first-time working groups scheduled, but if we're not going to have a 
> face-to-face session in 2020 (does anyone think we are?), it may be 
> worth asking the Aaron Falks of the world to think about what they 
> need to run HotRFC virtually, really, and whether that could be done 
> more frequently than three times per year.
>
> survey a couple of weeks ago - perhaps we got some helpful thoughts 
> there, too.
>
Oh, that's interesting. Sort of a spoken version of the bulletin board. 
I like that it acronym collides with rfc and is actually true to its 
acronym unlike it's elder :)

A virtual one would actually have an advantage that you could post a bar 
bof conference url too.

Mike