Meeting at IETF110?

[Peter van Dijk]

Hello Warren,

(I promise this email is not actually about DNS, even if it mentions it
a lot!)

(summary: if people are not traveling, why have IEPG in the same week
as IETF?)

On Tue, 2021-02-02 at 13:32 -0500, Warren Kumari wrote:
> We are trying to decide if we should meet at IETF110; please let us
> know as soon as possible[0] if you have topics that you'd like to
> discuss/present.

For the last few years, myself and a few friends have organised a DNS
devroom at FOSDEM. This made sense because plenty of DNS people were
there anyway, so why not have a meeting and talk about DNS things for
half a day!

FOSDEM 2021 is completely online. A few months ago, I talked to one of
my co-organisers, and I said 'we should probably sign up for a devroom
again'. He pointed out that since we stopped having physical
conferences, opportunities for DNS people to meet online have grown
greatly - higher frequency but shorter OARCs, online RIPE DNSWGs, etc.
So, the need for a DNS devroom at FOSDEM2021 is much smaller than in
other years.

We then had the secondary insight that FOSDEM, generally, is
overwhelming to people - two days, 30-40 devrooms, hard choices have to
be made as a visitor. The online version appears to be keeping those
numbers. So, better let people go to the things they like other than
DNS, and meet them again at the next OARC, or DNSWG, etc.

Now, the comparison is not 100% - IEPG does not overlap with IETF, but
it is very close to it, in a week that is already very busy for many
people. And IEPG is not a 'DNS meeting' or a 'BGP meeting' (although it
can sometimes be hard to tell the difference!).

So, I'm not here to tell you that you should do or not do a thing
because I did not do a thing, but I'm suggesting that you think about
whether it makes sense to have IEPG on the Sunday before IETF instead
of any other time, some time where you're not turning a five day
meeting into a six day meeting.

(There's a second perspective here too - if there is no travel anyway,
why -limit- yourself to IETF frequency?)

(I am also completely ignoring here that IEPG might benefit from the
IETF online conference setup configuration for the week.)

That's my 2 cents. Do with them what you like :)

Cheers, Peter