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+Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) M. Kühlewind
+Request for Comments: 9400 Ericsson
+Category: Informational M. Duke
+ISSN: 2070-1721 Google
+ June 2023
+
+
+ Guidelines for the Organization of Fully Online Meetings
+
+Abstract
+
+ This document provides guidelines for the planning and organization
+ of fully online meetings, regarding the number, length, and
+ composition of sessions on the meeting agenda. These guidelines are
+ based on the experience gained by holding online meetings during the
+ COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021.
+
+Status of This Memo
+
+ This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
+ published for informational purposes.
+
+ This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force
+ (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has
+ received public review and has been approved for publication by the
+ Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Not all documents
+ approved by the IESG are candidates for any level of Internet
+ Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 7841.
+
+ Information about the current status of this document, any errata,
+ and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at
+ https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9400.
+
+Copyright Notice
+
+ Copyright (c) 2023 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
+ document authors. All rights reserved.
+
+ This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
+ Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
+ (https://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of
+ publication of this document. Please review these documents
+ carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect
+ to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must
+ include Revised BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the
+ Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described
+ in the Revised BSD License.
+
+Table of Contents
+
+ 1. Introduction
+ 1.1. Requirements Language
+ 2. Some History
+ 3. Guidelines for Online Meeting Planning
+ 3.1. Time Zone Selection
+ 3.1.1. Guidelines for Selection
+ 3.2. Number of Days and Total Hours per Day
+ 3.3. Session/Break Length
+ 3.4. Number of Parallel Tracks
+ 4. Additional Considerations and Recommendations
+ 4.1. Full vs. Limited Agenda (and Interim Meetings)
+ 4.2. Flexibility of Time Usage
+ 4.3. Inclusivity and Socializing
+ 4.4. Experiments
+ 4.5. IANA Considerations
+ 4.6. Security Considerations
+ 5. References
+ 5.1. Normative References
+ 5.2. Informative References
+ Acknowledgments
+ Authors' Addresses
+
+1. Introduction
+
+ In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the IETF to convert all its
+ plenary meetings to online-only events. This document records the
+ experience gained by holding plenary meetings fully online and
+ proposes guidelines based on this experience. In general,
+ participant surveys indicated satisfaction with the organization of
+ these meetings.
+
+ Although these guidelines reflect lessons learned in 2020 and 2021,
+ the IETF is encouraged to continue to experiment with the format and
+ agenda of fully online meetings, using this document as a baseline.
+
+ Hybrid meetings (meaning meetings that have large remote
+ participation but also onsite participation) are out of scope.
+ However, some of the experience gained from fully online meetings
+ might also provide input for decisions regarding the organization of
+ hybrid meetings.
+
+1.1. Requirements Language
+
+ The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
+ "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and
+ "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in
+ BCP 14 [RFC2119] [RFC8174] when, and only when, they appear in all
+ capitals, as shown here.
+
+ This document uses the term "plenary meeting" for the whole IETF
+ meeting that covers the IETF meeting week; this term is used to
+ distinguish the plenary meeting from other IETF meetings like
+ "interim meetings". The term "administrative plenary" is used for
+ the respective session during the IETF meeting week that is usually
+ hosted on Wednesday.
+
+2. Some History
+
+ When the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a worldwide
+ pandemic in March 2020, the IETF canceled its plenary meeting and
+ organized an online replacement in less than 2 weeks. For this first
+ online-only meeting, the agenda was reduced to a set of sessions that
+ benefited most from cross-area participation, like BoFs, first-time
+ meetings of new working groups, and dispatch sessions. It also
+ included the administrative plenary to preserve the official handover
+ procedures that occur at March IETF meetings, as described in
+ [RFC8713].
+
+ With a reduced agenda, the meeting format was two sessions (about 4
+ hours) per day with a maximum of two parallel tracks. Other working
+ group meetings were scheduled as interims over the following 6 weeks.
+ The IESG published a purely advisory recommended schedule
+ [INTERIM-SCHEDULE] to reduce conflicts among those interims.
+
+ While satisfaction was high right after the meeting
+ [IETF107-FEEDBACK], some participants later indicated in mailing list
+ discussions that the period of intensive interims had a greater
+ impact on their calendar than a single plenary meeting week, and in
+ some meetings participation was reduced. Those interims tended to
+ occur at times convenient for the bulk of participants, which was
+ convenient for most but could exclude those in less common time
+ zones.
+
+ For the remainder of 2020 and 2021, the online schedule was switched
+ back to be similar to an in-person meeting (1- to 2-hour slots and
+ eight or nine parallel tracks). However, each day was limited to 5-6
+ hours in recognition that remote participation is more tiring.
+
+ All fully online meetings followed the time zone of the planned in-
+ person meeting location. As a 6-hour agenda has some flexibility
+ regarding the start time while still fitting within a previously used
+ 8-hour in-person agenda, the start time was approximately noon, with
+ adjustments of an hour or so to mitigate the impact of early morning
+ hours in time zones with many participants. As selection of in-
+ person meeting sites was consistent with the 1-1-1 guideline as
+ documented in [RFC8719], this approach was intended to share the
+ burden across all common geographies roughly equally.
+
+3. Guidelines for Online Meeting Planning
+
+3.1. Time Zone Selection
+
+ The following algorithm was not used in 2020 or 2021, but it enables
+ most participants to avoid late-night sessions in two out of every
+ three fully online IETF plenary meetings. Basically, every fully
+ online meeting is for two regions of the three regions described in
+ [RFC8719], with one being roughly after sunrise and the other around
+ sundown. This has the trade-off that the third region is in the
+ middle of night.
+
+ The times are also seasonally adjusted to leverage differentials in
+ Daylight Saving Time. These time slots are as follows, in UTC, based
+ on the Daylight Saving Practices at the time of publication:
+
+ +===============+=========================+=========================+
+ | Name | Times (Northern Summer) | Times (Northern |
+ | | | Winter) |
+ +===============+=========================+=========================+
+ | North America | 0500-1100 UTC | 0600-1200 UTC |
+ | Night | | |
+ +---------------+-------------------------+-------------------------+
+ | Asia Night | 1300-1900 UTC | 1400-2000 UTC |
+ +---------------+-------------------------+-------------------------+
+ | Europe Night | 2200-0400 UTC | 2200-0400 UTC |
+ +---------------+-------------------------+-------------------------+
+
+ Table 1
+
+ Note that the "Europe Night" slot covers the "early morning" slot for
+ Asia where most countries do not have Daylight Saving Time.
+
+ If Daylight Saving Practices change -- this change is under
+ consideration in multiple countries at the time of publication --
+ this table may need adjustment.
+
+ The intent of rotating between these three slots is to scatter
+ meetings throughout the course of the global day, to maximize the
+ ease of participants so that no attendee has to be consistently
+ inconvenienced, regardless of their location and what time of day is
+ optimal for their schedule. However, as participation is distributed
+ globally, it needs to be acknowledged that restricting the scheme to
+ three regions observes the intent of [RFC8719] but does not achieve
+ the goal of two non-late-night sessions for all participants equally.
+
+3.1.1. Guidelines for Selection
+
+ The IETF SHOULD select a start time from these three choices based on
+ the prior three meetings. The following table covers all
+ permutations of previous meetings held in person in Region A, B, or C
+ or remotely in the nights of one of those regions.
+
+ +====================+==================+==============+===========+
+ | Three Meetings Ago | Two Meetings Ago | Last Meeting | Online |
+ | | | | Selection |
+ +====================+==================+==============+===========+
+ | Any | Any | In-Person A | A Night |
+ +--------------------+------------------+--------------+-----------+
+ | Any | Online A Night | Online B | C Night |
+ | | | Night | |
+ +--------------------+------------------+--------------+-----------+
+ | Online A Night | In-Person B | Online B | C Night |
+ | | | Night | |
+ +--------------------+------------------+--------------+-----------+
+ | In-Person A | In-Person B | Online B | A Night |
+ | | | Night | |
+ +--------------------+------------------+--------------+-----------+
+ | In-Person A | In-Person A | Online A | See below |
+ | | | Night | |
+ +--------------------+------------------+--------------+-----------+
+ | Online A Night | Online B Night | Online C | A Night |
+ | | | Night | |
+ +--------------------+------------------+--------------+-----------+
+
+ Table 2
+
+ This table follows two basic guidelines:
+
+ 1) Whenever a fully online meeting follows an in-person meeting, the
+ online meeting time is used that most disadvantages the
+ participants in the time zone where the in-person meeting was
+ held.
+
+ 2) If multiple fully online meetings follow each other, the time
+ zone selection should be rotated based on the most recent time
+ zones in which the in-person meetings were held.
+
+ The final case occurs in the rare event that back-to-back in-person
+ plenary meetings occur in the same region. In this case, find the
+ most recent meeting that was in neither 'A' (if in person) nor 'A
+ Night' (if fully online). If this meeting was in person in region
+ 'B', then the next meeting should be in 'B Night'. If it was remote
+ in 'B Night', the next meeting should be in 'C Night'.
+
+3.2. Number of Days and Total Hours per Day
+
+ By 2021, fully online meetings were consistently held over 5 days
+ with roughly 6-hour meeting days. The day with the administrative
+ plenary, which concludes with multiple open mic sessions, sometimes
+ exceeded this limit.
+
+ Six hours of online meetings, with two 30-minute breaks, was a
+ compromise between the physical limits of attending an online meeting
+ in an inconvenient time zone and the demand for many sessions with a
+ manageable number of conflicts. The IETF 109 feedback
+ [IETF109-SURVEY] indicated broad satisfaction with a 5-day meeting
+ but only medium satisfaction with the overall length of each day.
+
+ The IETF did not seriously consider extending sessions into the
+ weekend before or after the main meeting week, although at IETF 108
+ and subsequent meetings the Hackathon occupied the entire week before
+ (see [RFC9311]).
+
+3.3. Session/Break Length
+
+ For fully online meetings, there are typically fewer sessions per day
+ than for in-person meetings, to keep the overall meeting day to
+ roughly 6 hours. With fewer sessions, chairs were offered only two
+ options for session length (instead of three).
+
+ IETF 108, based on an indicated preference of the community,
+ scheduled 50- and 100-minute slots, with 10-minute breaks, in order
+ to keep the overall day length at 5 hours. This resulted in many
+ sessions going over time, which indicated that 10 minutes for breaks
+ is not practical.
+
+ The survey after IETF 109 [IETF109-SURVEY] showed high satisfaction
+ with 60/120-minute session lengths and 30-minute breaks, and a
+ significant improvement in satisfaction over IETF 108.
+
+ The longer breaks, while extending the day, provided adequate time
+ for meals, exercise, and "hallway" conversations using online tools.
+
+3.4. Number of Parallel Tracks
+
+ In-person meetings are limited in the number of parallel tracks by
+ the number of meeting rooms, but online meetings are not. However,
+ more parallel tracks would increase the number of possible agenda
+ conflicts.
+
+ If the total number of requested sessions exceeds the capacity of the
+ usual eight parallel tracks, it is possible for a fully online
+ meeting to simply use more tracks. If the number and length of
+ meeting days are seen as fixed, this decision is implicitly made by
+ the working group chairs requesting a certain number of sessions and
+ length.
+
+ IETF 111 used nine parallel tracks for some of the sessions and
+ experienced slightly more conflicts in the agenda-scheduling process,
+ though there was no statistically significant increase in
+ dissatisfaction about conflicts in the survey [IETF111-SURVEY].
+
+ The IESG encouraged working group chairs to limit their session
+ requests and use interim meetings aggressively for focused work.
+
+4. Additional Considerations and Recommendations
+
+4.1. Full vs. Limited Agenda (and Interim Meetings)
+
+ The IETF 108 meeting survey [IETF108-SURVEY] asked about the
+ structure of that meeting (full meeting) compared to that of IETF
+ 107, which hosted only a limited set of sessions followed by interims
+ in the weeks after. The structure of IETF 108 was preferred by 82%.
+ Respondents valued cross-participation and an intensive meeting week
+ for maintaining project momentum.
+
+ Furthermore, a well-defined meeting time, rather than spreading many
+ interims over the whole year, can make deconflicting with other non-
+ IETF meetings easier.
+
+ However, interim meetings can also help to reduce scheduling
+ conflicts during an IETF week and allow for a more optimal time slot
+ for the key participants. While interim meetings are less likely to
+ attract people with casual interest, they provide a good opportunity
+ for the most active participants of a group to have detailed
+ technical discussions and solve recorded issues efficiently.
+
+4.2. Flexibility of Time Usage
+
+ This document recommends further experiments with reducing conflicts
+ by leveraging the increased flexibility of the online format.
+
+ An in-person meeting must fit all sessions into an acceptable length
+ for international travel (usually roughly a week), but online
+ meetings do not have that constraint.
+
+ Therefore, it would be possible to keep most regular working group
+ sessions within the usual 5 main meeting days but have some of the
+ more conflicted sessions in other dedicated time slots. As the
+ Hackathon for fully online meetings is usually held in the week
+ before the online plenary meeting [RFC9311], that week is already a
+ highly active week for many IETF participants and might provide an
+ opportunity to schedule a few selected sessions.
+
+ This might work especially well for sessions that are of high
+ interest to a large part of the community, such as BoFs and dispatch
+ meetings, and therefore hard to schedule during the main IETF week.
+
+ At IETF 112, the IESG ran an experiment where the administrative
+ plenary was scheduled on the Wednesday before the official session
+ week. The experiment report [IETF112-EXPERIMENT] found that it led
+ to a reduction in scheduling conflicts but also a slight drop in
+ attendance of the administrative plenary, partly due to insufficient
+ awareness.
+
+4.3. Inclusivity and Socializing
+
+ Participation in the fully online meetings in 2021 was high and had a
+ stable per-country distribution, even though time zones were rotated.
+ This indicates that online meetings support a more consistent
+ geographic distribution of participants than in-person meetings,
+ where participation often fluctuates based on the location.
+
+ However, online meetings do not provide an equivalent opportunity to
+ socialize. Despite significant investment in tools to foster hallway
+ conversations, many did not use those tools, whether due to ignorance
+ of them, dislike of the tools, or a preference for other activities
+ at home (including sleep and food) over hallway interactions.
+
+ There was a decrease in submissions of new (-00) Internet-Drafts
+ during 2020 and 2021, although the overall number of draft
+ submissions remained stable; this decrease in new submissions might
+ have resulted from the loss of these interactions. Informal
+ conversations might be important to inspire new work.
+
+4.4. Experiments
+
+ This document recommends further experiments with the meeting
+ structure. Often, only practical experience can answer open
+ questions. A given meeting SHOULD only experiment with one major
+ change at a time in order to be able to assess the outcome correctly.
+ Furthermore, the IESG SHOULD announce any such experiment well in
+ advance, so people can adjust to changes and potentially provide
+ feedback.
+
+4.5. IANA Considerations
+
+ This document has no IANA actions.
+
+4.6. Security Considerations
+
+ This document has no security considerations.
+
+5. References
+
+5.1. Normative References
+
+ [RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
+ Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119,
+ DOI 10.17487/RFC2119, March 1997,
+ <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc2119>.
+
+ [RFC8174] Leiba, B., "Ambiguity of Uppercase vs Lowercase in RFC
+ 2119 Key Words", BCP 14, RFC 8174, DOI 10.17487/RFC8174,
+ May 2017, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8174>.
+
+ [RFC8719] Krishnan, S., "High-Level Guidance for the Meeting Policy
+ of the IETF", BCP 226, RFC 8719, DOI 10.17487/RFC8719,
+ February 2020, <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8719>.
+
+5.2. Informative References
+
+ [IETF107-FEEDBACK]
+ Daley, J., "IETF 107 Virtual Meeting Survey", 17 April
+ 2020, <https://www.ietf.org/media/documents/ietf-107-
+ survey-results.pdf>.
+
+ [IETF108-SURVEY]
+ Daley, J., "IETF 108 Meeting Survey", 13 August 2020,
+ <https://www.ietf.org/blog/ietf-108-meeting-survey/>.
+
+ [IETF109-SURVEY]
+ Daley, J., "IETF 109 Post-Meeting Survey", 7 December
+ 2020,
+ <https://www.ietf.org/blog/ietf-109-post-meeting-survey/>.
+
+ [IETF111-SURVEY]
+ Daley, J., "IETF 111 post-meeting survey", 23 August 2021,
+ <https://www.ietf.org/blog/ietf-111-post-meeting-survey/>.
+
+ [IETF112-EXPERIMENT]
+ IESG, "IETF 112 Plenary Experiment Evaluation", 4 February
+ 2022, <https://www.ietf.org/blog/ietf112-plenary-
+ experiment-evaluation/>.
+
+ [INTERIM-SCHEDULE]
+ Cooper, A., "Subject: Post-IETF-107 Recommended Virtual
+ Interim Schedule", message to the Working Group Chairs
+ mailing list, 13 March 2020,
+ <https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/wgchairs/
+ l382SqKVVHoTzFw9kIYl2boM6_c/>.
+
+ [RFC8713] Kucherawy, M., Ed., Hinden, R., Ed., and J. Livingood,
+ Ed., "IAB, IESG, IETF Trust, and IETF LLC Selection,
+ Confirmation, and Recall Process: Operation of the IETF
+ Nominating and Recall Committees", BCP 10, RFC 8713,
+ DOI 10.17487/RFC8713, February 2020,
+ <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8713>.
+
+ [RFC9311] Eckel, C., "Running an IETF Hackathon", RFC 9311,
+ DOI 10.17487/RFC9311, September 2022,
+ <https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc9311>.
+
+Acknowledgments
+
+ Thanks to Brian Carpenter, Lars Eggert, Toerless Eckert, Charles
+ Eckel, Jason Livingood, Sanjeev Gupta, Dale Worley, and Mark
+ Nottingham for their reviews, and thanks to the many other people who
+ provided input and suggestions on the time zone discussion!
+
+Authors' Addresses
+
+ Mirja Kühlewind
+ Ericsson
+ Email: mirja.kuehlewind@ericsson.com
+
+
+ Martin Duke
+ Google
+ Email: martin.h.duke@gmail.com