Guidelines for the Organization of Fully Online Meetings

Introduction In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the IETF to move 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 indicate 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 higher remote participation than 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.

Some History When the WHO declared a world-wide pandemic in March 2020, the IETF canceled its plenary meeting and organized an online replacement in less than two weeks. For this first online-only meeting, the agenda was reduced to a set of sessions that benefitted 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 hand-over procedures that occur at the March meeting, as described in . With a reduced agenda, the meeting format was 2 sessions (about 4 hours) a day and a maximum of two parallel tracks. Other working group meetings were scheduled as interims over the following six weeks. The IESG published a purely advisory recommended schedule to reduce conflicts among those interims. Some participants said the period of intensive interims had a greater impact on their calendar than a single plenary meeting week, and reduced participation. 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 (1-2 hour slots and 8-9 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 six-hour agenda has some flexibility regarding the start time while still fitting within a traditional 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 , this approach was intended to share the burden across all common geographies roughly equally.

Guidelines for Online Meeting Planning

Time Zone Selection The following algorithm was not used in 2020 or 2021, but enables most participants to avoid late-night sessions in 2 out of every 3 fully online IETF plenary meetings. Basically, every full online meeting is for two regions of the three regions described in , with one being roughly after sunrise and the other after dinner. This has the tradeoff that the third region is in the middle of night. The times are also seasonally adjusted to leverage differentials in Daylight Savings Time. These time slots are as follows, in UTC:

Name	Times (Northern Summer)	Times (Northern Winter)
North America Night	0500-1100 UTC	0600-1200 UTC
Asia Night	1300-1900 UTC	1400-2000 UTC
Europe Night	2200-0400 UTC	2200-0400 UTC

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 to occasionally attend regardless of their location and what time of day is optimal for their schedule.

Guidelines for selection The IETF SHOULD select a start time from these three choices based on the past 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.

3 meetings ago	2 meetings ago	Last Meeting	Online Selection
Any	Any	In-Person A	A Night
Any	Online A Night	Online B Night	C Night
Online A Night	In-Person B	Online B Night	C Night
In-Person A	In-Person B	Online B Night	A Night
In-Person A	In-Person A	Online A Night	see below
Online A Night	Online B Night	Online C Night	A Night

This table follows two basic guidelines: 1) When ever a fully online meeting follows an in-person meeting, the online meeting time is used that disadvantages most the participants of 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 that the in-person meetings were held in. The final case occurs in the rare event that back-to-back in-person plenaries occur in the same region. In this case, find the most recent meeting that was neither in 'A' (if in person) nor in 'A' night (if remote). 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.

Number of Days and Total Hours per Day By 2021, online meetings were consistently over 5 days with roughly 6-hour meeting days. The administrative plenary, which concludes with multiple open mic sessions, would sometimes exceed 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 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 the Hackathon occupied the entire week before (see ).

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 at 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 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 "hallway" conversations using online tools, exercise, and meals.

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 increases the number of possible conflicts. If the total number of requested sessions exceeds the capacity of the usual 8 parallel tracks, it is possible for a fully online meeting to simply use more tracks. If the number and length of meeting days is seen as fixed, this decision is implicitly made by the working group chairs requesting a certain number of sessions and length. IETF-111 used 9 parallel tracks for some of the sessions, and experienced slightly more conflicts in the formal scheduling process, though there was no statistically signficant increase in dissatisfaction about conflicts in the survey . The IESG encouraged working group chairs to limit their session requests and use interim meetings aggressively for focused work.

Additional Considerations and Recommendations

Full vs. limited agenda (and interim meetings) The IETF-108 meeting survey asked about the structure of that meeting (full meeting) compared to that of IETF 107, which hosted only a limited set of session 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.

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 five main meeting days but have some of the more conflicted sessions in other dedicated time slots. As the Hackathon for online only meetings is usually held in the week before the online plenary meeting , 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 for a large part of 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 adminstrative plenary was scheduled on the Wednesday before the official session week. The experiment report found that it led to a reduction in scheduling conflicts but also a slight drop in plenary attendance, partly due to insufficient awareness.

Inclusivity and Socializing Participation at the online only 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 the amusements of home (including sleep) over hallway interactions. There was a slight decrease in submission of new (-00) drafts during 2020 and 2021, although the overall number of draft submissions remained stable, which might result from the loss of these interactions. Informal conversations might be important to inspire new work.

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 Furthermore, the IESG SHOULD announce any such experiment in advance, so people can adjust to changes and potentially provide feedback.

Acknowledgments Thanks to Brian Carpenter, Lars Eggert, Toreless Eckert, Charles Eckel, Jason Livingood, and Sanjeev Gupta for their review and many from more for their input and suggestions on the time zone discussion!