Subject: [apps-discuss] Replacing the Apps Area meeting

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 08 Oct 2015 12:02:54 -0400

Hi.  (copying Naline and Marius because this note was triggered
by a discussion about mentoring)

Historically the late Apps Area held a Monday morning meeting at
IETF that served several purposes in addition to sharing a slot
with Apps AWG once that activity got started.  One of those
purposes was to provide something of a readmap of what was
happening during the week, giving people some guidance about how
to match their interests to whatever WG and BOF sessions were
going on.  That particular function may be even more important
with the larger and more diverse ART area, especially for
relative newcomers who are trying to identify relevant WGs.

I note that there does not appear to be any similar session on
the preliminary IETF 94 agenda.  DISPATCH, scheduled for
Wednesday afternoon, presumably serves some of the function of
the former area meeting, but does not address others and is too
late in the week to be helpful for the role described above.   

I assume the ADs concluded that time was better spent in other
ways than a Monday morning area meeting and am not questioning
that decision.   However, it seems to me that it would be
worthwhile to identify "tracks" or clusters of WGs within the
area and/or to get one-paragraph summaries of what each WGs is
about and what is expected to be important for the WG at the
meeting.  That information is not easily extracted, especially
by relative newcomers, from either an alphabetical list of WGs
and charters (such as the one at http://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/
or from the agenda links that eventually appear on the IETF
Agenda page(s) -- a different sort of summary is needed.  It
seems to me that WG Chairs should be able to produce those
summaries -- more or less the same information the former Apps
ones were expected to present during the area meeting-- rather
easily and that they would have the incentive of broadening
participation for doing so.

best,
   john