Subject: [secdir] [new-work] WG Review: Stay Home Meet Only Online (shmoo)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 07 Feb 2022 10:45:30 -0800

The Stay Home Meet Only Online (shmoo) WG in the General Area of the IETF is
undergoing rechartering. The IESG has not made any determination yet. The
following draft charter was submitted, and is provided for informational
purposes only. Please send your comments to the IESG mailing list
([email-masked]) by 2022-02-17.

Stay Home Meet Only Online (shmoo)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Current status: Active WG

Chairs:
  Suresh Krishnan <[email-masked]>
  Mallory Knodel <[email-masked]>

Assigned Area Director:
  Lars Eggert <[email-masked]>

General Area Directors:
  Lars Eggert <[email-masked]>

Mailing list:
  Address: [email-masked]
  To subscribe: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/manycouches
  Archive: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/manycouches/

Group page: https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/shmoo/

Charter: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/charter-ietf-shmoo/

Stay Home Meet Occasionally Online (shmoo)

The disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic may have been mitigated by the
time this group completes its work, but the experience of handling meeting
planning during the pandemic has proven that having community consensus
guidance at hand when dealing with novel conditions in the future is
beneficial.

The disruption of the IETF's typical schedule of three mostly-in-person
meetings per year, is causing it to convert a number of such meetings to
fully online meetings. Yet discussions about the possibility of fully or
mostly online meetings had been occurring in the IETF community for years as
a result of general increases in remote attendance, improvements in web
conferencing services, concerns about the environmental impact of travel, and
other reasons. It might therefore happen that in-person meeting participation
will become less popular and that a significant fraction of  participants
will be remote.

The meeting planning activities that the IESG and the IETF LLC engage in would
benefit from IETF community consensus guidance concerning novel aspects raised
by these developments. The SHMOO working group is therefore chartered to
document high-level guidance and principles to the IESG and the IETF LLC.

The guidance and principles will concern the following:

- Meeting planning for fully online meetings. Similar to how RFC 8719
  establishes guidance for the regional rotation of in-person meetings, the
  IESG and the LLC would benefit from having community consensus guidelines
  about the time zone selection, meeting length in days, and other high-level
  scheduling aspects when an in-person meeting must be canceled. This work
  item is expected to be fulfilled with the publication of one or more BCPs.

- Meeting planning for mostly online, or “hybrid,” meetings. Meetings that
have
  an in-person component but with significantly more remote participants than
  a mostly-in-person meeting need to be planned with community consensus
  guidelines, too. While trade-offs have often been addressed in favor of
  onsite attendees, the IESG and LLC would benefit from having community
  consensus on high-level guidance about the organization of such hybrid
  meetings, regarding such things as the meeting schedule, the meeting length
  in days, and acceptable limitations on the maximum allowed or minimum
  expected onsite attendees, whether and how to schedule and prioritize among
  onsite activities such as side meetings, the terminal room, the code
  lounge, and others, and other scheduling aspects.

- Determinations about the meeting fee structure for remote participation.
Since
  remote participation in mostly-in-person meetings has historically been
  free, IETF LLC and IESG decisions about the meeting fee structure for
  remote participation need to be informed by community guidelines. This work
  item is expected to be fulfilled with the publication of one or more BCPs.
  Suggestions for changing the IETF's overall funding model are out of scope.

- The cadence of meeting scheduling and the mix of mostly-in-person, hybrid
and
  fully online meetings going forward as well as the format of meetings, e.g.,
  use of interims compared to components and length of the plenary meeting
  (week). The working group is expected to document the expected future
  meeting cadence and format as a BCP if consensus emerges to depart from the
  existing cadence of three mostly-in-person meetings per year. Notably, any
  such guidance will not become actionable until 3-4 years after it achieves
  consensus, given the length of the IETF meeting planning cycle.

The work of SHMOO is expected to produce high-level principles, not detailed
operational plans. The goal is to produce guidelines for the IESG and the IETF
LLC to operationalize while ensuring they have substantial flexibility to
continue to deliver and evolve the IETF meeting experience to best serve IETF
participants and the Internet community at large. Specifications of details
concerning cancellation criteria, meeting technologies, and online meeting
agenda formats and content are out of scope. Aside from the fourth work item
above, discussion of financial aspects of IETF meetings and changes to RFC
8713 are both out of scope. Scheduling guidance for interim meetings is out
of scope.

Milestones:

TBD

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