Network Working Group L. Eggert Internet-Draft Nokia Intended status: Informational January 26, 2011 Expires: July 30, 2011 Considerations for Having a Successful "Bar BOF" Side Meeting draft-eggert-successful-bar-bof-01 Abstract New work is typically brought to the IETF by a group of interested individuals. IETF meetings are a convenient place for such groups to hold informal get-togethers to discuss and develop their ideas. Such side meetings, which are not reflected in the IETF meeting agenda and have no official status, are often half jokingly referred to as "bar BOF" sessions, to acknowledge that some of them may eventually lead to a proposal for an official IETF BOF ("birds of a feather" session) on a given topic. During recent IETF meetings, many such "bar BOF" get-togethers have been organized and moderated in ways that made them increasingly indistinguishable from official IETF BOFs or sometimes even IETF working group meetings. This document argues that this recent trend is not helpful in reaching the ultimate goal of many of these get-togethers, i.e., to efficiently discuss and develop ideas for new IETF work. It encourages the organizers of such side meetings to consider the benefits of holding their get-togethers in much less formal settings, and to also consider alternative means to develop their ideas. Status of this Memo This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79. This document may not be modified, and derivative works of it may not be created, and it may not be published except as an Internet-Draft. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet- Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." Eggert Expires July 30, 2011 [Page 1] Internet-Draft Successful Bar BOF Side Meetings January 2011 This Internet-Draft will expire on July 30, 2011. Copyright Notice Copyright (c) 2011 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 (http://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 Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License. 1. Introduction A typical IETF meeting is full of sessions of different kinds. In addition to official IETF and IRTF sessions listed in the meeting agenda, such as working and research group meetings, area meetings or plenaries, many other unofficial meetings take place. These include meetings between IETF participants from one organization or company, design team meetings, ISOC sessions, Internet-Draft editing sessions, interoperability testing, directorate lunches and many others. Some of these unofficial get-togethers are organized by individual participants with a common interest in initiating new IETF work of some kind. New IETF work often fits into an existing working group and does not require an official "birds of a feather" (BOF) session to determine community consensus. Nevertheless, the phrase "bar BOF" is commonly used in the community when talking about such informal get-togethers that are held to discuss potential new work. [RFC4677] characterizes a "bar BOF" as "(...) an unofficial get-together, usually in the late evening, during which a lot of work gets done over drinks. Bar BOFs spring up in many different places around an IETF meeting, such as restaurants, coffee shops, and (if we are so lucky) pools." During recent IETF meetings, "bar BOFs" have become increasingly indistinguishable from official IETF BOFs or sometimes even IETF working group meetings. The symptoms of this trend are unofficial "bar BOFs" that are held in regular IETF meeting rooms with classroom-style seating, agendas with lengthy slide presentations, use of microphone lines, and even formal consensus calls. And, Eggert Expires July 30, 2011 [Page 2] Internet-Draft Successful Bar BOF Side Meetings January 2011 perhaps most importantly, a distinct lack of drinks. This document argues that this recent trend is not helpful in reaching the ultimate goal of many of these get-togethers, i.e., to brainstorm about a technical topic that may eventually lead to new IETF work. It encourages the organizers of these unofficial side meetings to consider the benefits of holding such get-togethers in much less formal settings. Finally, it is important to remember that many participants are extremely busy during an IETF meeting. Although having a side meeting to discuss an idea in an informal face-to-face setting is attractive, the scheduling of such meetings is therefore very difficult and needs to happen weeks if not months prior to the meeting itself. Conference calls, email discussions, wikis and other ways for interacting are also effective at developing ideas. 2. How to Invite A good rule of thumb is that side meeting to discuss and develop a proposal for new IETF work should include the necessary participants to achieve that purpose, and no more. Smaller meetings are usually more successful than larger meetings. Hence, it is often useful to limit attendance carefully. Publicly broadcasting an announcement for a side meeting on a particular topic, e.g., on an IETF mailing list, is therefore not usually a good method of inviting the desired set of participants. One reason is that if the announcement happens to attract a large response, the logistics of organizing a get-together for a larger group quickly becomes very difficult. Small groups fit comfortably around a table at a bar or a restaurant, or can find a quite corner in an IETF hallway for a discussion. Larger groups require dedicated meeting facilities, which are limited during IETF meetings, and they generally require much more careful planning in order to get work done. When publicly announcing a side meeting, it is often not even possible for the organizers to determine how large the resulting get- together will be, forcing them to over-provision for the "best" case of a substantial attendance, even in cases where this turns out to be not necessary. And even when a large group comes together, it often mostly consists of "tourists" who do not actively participate in the get-together but whose attendance requires finding larger rooms and makes the interactions between the active participants more cumbersome, e.g., because microphones need to be used in larger Eggert Expires July 30, 2011 [Page 3] Internet-Draft Successful Bar BOF Side Meetings January 2011 rooms. In the initial stages of developing a proposal for new IETF work, the ability to brainstorm, i.e., to have direct, interactive and high- bandwidth discussions between participants interested and experienced in the topic area, is tremendously important. This is clearly much more easily achieved in a smaller setting, where half-baked ideas can be dissected and developed. This is often not possible in a larger group. Even worse, a badly run large meeting can sometimes "poison the waters" for a proposed idea by convincing the broader community that the proposal is confused, not ready or otherwise uninteresting. It is important to understand that in the IETF, proposals for new work are judged based on their technical merits and on whether there is enough energy and interest in the community to complete the work in a timely manner. This happens in the relevant working group, if one exists, or else during an official BOF session. How many warm bodies fill a room during an unofficial side meeting has no influence on this decision, and is not a good metric for reporting interest in a topic to the community or to employers. Discussions about new work are often controversial, and people do like to watch fireworks... 3. Where to Meet As the colloquial name "bar BOF" implies, such get-togethers are traditionally held in bars or restaurants. Recently, there has been a distinct shift towards holding such meetings in regular IETF meeting rooms. One reason for this trend has been discussed in Section 2; namely, that an uncontrolled broadcast announcement requires over-provisioning of facilities. A likely second reason for this trend is that the booking of an IETF room currently requires approval by an Area Director. The reason for this is simply to make sure that IETF-paid rooms are used for meetings that in the widest sense are IETF-related. However, the approval of a room request has been known to sometimes be reported as Area Director "support" for the topic of the meeting to the community or to employers. No such support is expressed or implied when Area Directors approve room requests! Many routinely say "yes" to every incoming request as long as there are meeting rooms available (and there are typically lots of meeting rooms available). Holding "bar BOFs" in IETF meeting rooms does not make them any more official or valid than get-togethers that happen in other places. Participants have recently begun to list the times of some "bar BOFs" on a wiki page, but that does not make them part of the official IETF agenda or otherwise changes their unofficial status. Eggert Expires July 30, 2011 [Page 4] Internet-Draft Successful Bar BOF Side Meetings January 2011 IETF meeting rooms clearly do not provide the most supportive environment for side meetings that require brainstorming on a new technical proposal. One reason is that the classroom-style seating often present in IETF meeting rooms tends to spread people out in rows, all facing towards a front presenter: good for presentations, bad for discussion. Because IETF meeting rooms tend to be large, and people have a natural tendency to spread out, holding a meeting there often requires microphone use, which is cumbersome, slows a discussion down, and leads to "question-answer" dialogs between two people, which is much more ineffective than a group discussion around a restaurant table. Another reason is more pragmatic. Because the organizers of unofficial get-togethers can only use IETF meeting rooms during times when they are not otherwise in use, such side meetings often happen during breakfast, lunch, dinner or later in the evening. This prolongs the time during which IETF participants are stuck in the same rooms they're stuck in for the rest of the day, and it prevents them from having a regular and at least somewhat relaxed meal. Anecdotal evidence exists that at least one Area Director has not been able to set foot outside the IETF hotel for a stretch of several days during IETF-77. (IETF-77 was held in Anaheim, CA, and the food options in and near the hotel were, let's say, of severely limited quality.) It is unlikely that participants in the consequential mental and bodily state will make productive contributions to a "bar BOF" or, in the case of Area Directors, will be extremely receptive towards new work proposals. Food, drink and a relaxed atmosphere in which to have a discussion are an essential part of a successful side meeting, because they often need to happen during meal times. IETF meeting rooms offer neither. 4. How to Meet Several of the recent "bar BOFs" that were held in IETF meeting rooms emulated official IETF meetings to a degree that made them indistinguishable from a regular working group meeting for the average IETF attendee. This included detailed agendas, lengthy presentations, organizers who refer to themselves as "bar BOF chairs", emulating blue sheets, and even hums and other consensus calls. It is not clear as to why this has been happening. One attempt at an explanation may be that holding a get-together in an IETF room and having the organizers behave like chairs behave during regular IETF sessions is causing a Pavlovian stimulus in the attendees. Another Eggert Expires July 30, 2011 [Page 5] Internet-Draft Successful Bar BOF Side Meetings January 2011 explanation attempt is that an IETF meeting room simply doesn't allow many other forms of discussion. Whatever the reason for this development is, it is reasonably obvious that running a side meeting with a focus on making quick progress on a technical proposal in a way that emulates running a working group session is not very productive. Working group sessions follow a certain procedures due to larger audiences, the need to establish formal consensus, etc. that a side meeting can do without. Because the reasons for organizing such a get-together are diverse, this section is not making more specific suggestions, other than to note that meeting outside of an IETF meeting room is likely going to shift the dynamics sufficiently so that better interactions and results become possible. 5. Miscellaneous Recommendations This section collects assorted recommendations on holding "bar BOFs" that at the moment do not warrant their own section. Those recommendations are: o Side meetings are often scheduled following IETF evening plenaries, which frequently end before the time indicated on the meeting agenda (and sometimes end later). It is therefore useful to avoid scheduling such meetings at a fixed time, and instead schedule them "X minutes after the end of the plenary." That way, attendees do not need to wait if the plenary finishes early, and do not need to leave the plenary should it run late. o Official sessions during an IETF meeting are covered by the IETF "Note Well" [NOTEWELL]. Side meetings are not an official part of the IETF meeting, so the IETF "Note Well" with its related implications, e.g., on the need to disclose IPR, does not generally apply. This is important for participants to realize. 6. Conclusions "Bar BOF" organizers are encouraged to rekindle the original spirit behind "bar BOFs" and organize them outside IETF meeting rooms, at venues with food and drink, for smaller groups and in a way that does not needlessly mimic the way official IETF sessions are conducted. It can often be useful to discuss proposals for new IETF work face- to-face in an informal setting, but conference calls, email discussions, wikis and other means for interactions are also Eggert Expires July 30, 2011 [Page 6] Internet-Draft Successful Bar BOF Side Meetings January 2011 effective at developing ideas, especially given the scheduling difficulties when busy individuals are involved during an IETF meeting. Finally, it is important to remember that all side meetings during an IETF week are purely informal and have no official status whatsoever. 7. IANA Considerations This document raises no IANA considerations. [Note to the RFC Editor: Please remove this section upon publication.] 8. Security Considerations This document has no known security implications. [Note to the RFC Editor: Please remove this section upon publication.] 9. Acknowledgments The name and title of this document have been chosen to resemble those used by Thomas Narten for his guidelines document on holding a successful BOF [RFC5434], as a sign of appreciation for a document that has proven to be invaluable many times over. Several folks provided feedback and input on this document, including Fred Baker, Gonzalo Camarillo, Spencer Dawkins, Adrian Farrel, David Harrington, Cullen Jennings, and Dan Wing. Lars Eggert is partly funded by [TRILOGY], a research project supported by the European Commission under its Seventh Framework Program. 10. Informative References [NOTEWELL] "Note Well", http://www.ietf.org/about/note-well.html. [RFC4677] Hoffman, P. and S. Harris, "The Tao of IETF - A Novice's Guide to the Internet Engineering Task Force", RFC 4677, September 2006. Eggert Expires July 30, 2011 [Page 7] Internet-Draft Successful Bar BOF Side Meetings January 2011 [RFC5434] Narten, T., "Considerations for Having a Successful Birds- of-a-Feather (BOF) Session", RFC 5434, February 2009. [TRILOGY] "Trilogy Project", http://www.trilogy-project.org/. Author's Address Lars Eggert Nokia Research Center P.O. Box 407 Nokia Group 00045 Finland Phone: +358 50 48 24461 Email: lars.eggert@nokia.com URI: http://research.nokia.com/people/lars_eggert Eggert Expires July 30, 2011 [Page 8]