I guess my reaction to the idea of going to a hub is that most of the value of attending in-person is the hallway track and serendipitous meetings with folks, which a hub is not going to offer except in a very limited way. The trade-off for the upsides of in-person attendance is the travel burden. So if I have to travel at all, I would want to go to the official meeting site.
Kyle
On Wed, Mar 26, 2025 at 12:52 PM Bob Hinden <bob.hinden@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Christian,On Mar 26, 2025, at 9:41 AM, Christian Huitema <huitema@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:Thanks for the reminder, Ted. We should not believe that "regional hubs" are a magic solution. Your concrete experience confirms my doubts. Would I personally prefer traveling to a hub in San Francisco or Chicago rather than traveling to Madrid or attending from home? I don't think so. We would need a lot of work to make sure that the hub option is better than "just call from home or the office."I agree. Time zones make this very challenging. Going to a hub to attend a meeting in the middle of the night sounds terrible to me. For example, assuming a 9:30am start in Madrid, that would be 1:30am in San Francisco.Bob-- Christian HuitemaOn Mar 26, 2025, at 8:50 AM, Ted Hardie <ted.ietf@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:As a reminder, we did try to run remote hubs for IETF 98, when there was an issue with folks being able to reach the Chicago venue. Warren Kumari and I arranged for Google to host some full-meeting hubs, with the intent to host one in the same time zone (Eastern Canada) and others where there was critical mass according to a form we sent out requesting expressions of interest.I've added Warren directly, in case he has more details in his files; what I have indicates that we had very low interest in the same time zone theory and we dropped that site. We did get interest in Europe and hosted a site in Zurich, but it had pretty small attendance. Even though folks were dealing with much more rudimentary remote experiences then, I believe most people preferred to stay home/at their job site rather than travel to a hub for the full meeting.According the meeting wiki (https://web.archive.org/web/20240316161154/https://www6.ietf.org/registration/MeetingWiki/wiki/doku.php?id=98remotehubs) there were also remote hubs active for specific working group meetings; I don't have any insight into how that went, since I was at the Zurich hub.A lot has changed since IETF 98, but I think there are significant issues with assuming generalized hubs are the anwer:The IETF has multiple areas which can function like sub-communities. The hallway conversation of a local hub may not be interesting unless the pool of attendees is large enough to contain the folks from the working groups of interest to a specific attendee. Within a hub, it's not clear that the experience of the sessions themselves is substantially better than a remot attendance; for anyone with a specialized set up at home, it can be worse. It can also be harder to get travel funding to a remote hub than to the main meeting.This is not to discourage continued thought on it, only to remind folks that we did try this once before, and that the quick-and-dirty version was not really a success. A new run at this will take sustained effort and some real thought on how to knit together the folks both at specific hubs and between them.regards,Ted HardieOn Wed, Mar 26, 2025 at 1:45 PM Shashank Yadav <shashank@asatae.foundation> wrote:>> Thus my suggestion that many this could be a multi-hub experiment.Yes, many international / transnational events are shifting to a multi-hub approach. Over the ease of participants, there is also a sustainability argument [1]. So I second this, and not just experimentally.
What are the problems in going multi-hub?
[1] https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/105/1/BAMS-D-23-0160.1.xml
regards. Shashank
The task is not impossible.
