I quite like the idea, and am reminded of my experience at 123. We had a time slot at the venue, which I had remote access to. We now have a working group at OARC, called dns-resilience. Apparently it was less fussy to get it set up there, than it was at IETF. I would consider it one of the small WGs you mention, and it sprouted out of dnsop here. Come to think of it, does dnsop have a meaningful expiration date... It is currently going through rechartering, for what that's worth.
In terms of meeting time, I think it's worth asking what the meetings are actually for. Personally, I do not find them very useful for moving the work itself forward -- they're too short for that. 15 minutes would make everyone have to very carefully choose their words. But if it works for scheduling, then great. For the meat and potatoes of the working group's actual work, I think mailing lists are still ideal. You do the work when you have time to do it, and you read up on it when you have time to do that.
Meanwhile I think that what the meetings are best at, is the human factor -- establishing mutual trust. For that, I think that both online meetings (in- or outside of the overarching WG's hosting party) and face-to-face meetings (hosted by the WG's hosting party) are most useful. The time allocation to do that, can be quite arbitrary.
Met vriendelijke groet,
Michael De Roover
Mail: ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Web: michael.de.roover.eu.org
What are ideas but thoughts in our heads,
if we cannot collaborate to make them reality?
-- vim@xxxxxxxxxxxx
On Monday, 28 July 2025 18:14:27 CEST Michael StJohns wrote:
> Hi -
>
> Sitting in on the various DISPATCH and DISPATCH-like discussions, I came
> to a conclusion that we may be doing ourselves a disservice in the way
> we think of WGs. I.e., one size fits all.
>
> Quite a number of the conclusions on the documents or topics were sort
> of of the form "could use a WG, but none exists - maybe create one",�
> but that comes with a lot of overhead.� E.g. space at the F2F meetings,
> chairs, AD oversight, perhaps an overly broad focus? (I intentionally
> ignore mailing lists and github repos here as the cost is negligent for
> the operation).
>
> What if we define a class of "tiny" WGs, laser focused on a single
> topic, with a very short timeframe and with a small (2-3?) permitted
> number of documents ALL due at the same time, and with a single chair?�
> �No extensions, no recharters, feet to the fire. �Easier to get
> chartered, impossible to live more than say 18 months.� Participants
> agree to a bit more "chair is in charge" than we usually see or need.�
> Ideally, chair is a facilitator, not a participant and/or editor and
> chosen by the AD for that purpose.� �Chair can kill the WG if progress
> isn't being made on schedule.
>
> At any given F2F meeting, there would be 1 or 2 sessions where each tiny
> WG would get no more than 15 minutes of talk-talk time. �Any tiny WG
> ending before the next F2F would get 30 minutes and that would feed into
> an area review of the documents.
>
> Any tiny WG past its expiration date would be required to focus only on
> resolving last-call comments from various reviews - no feature creep
> permitted.� �Datatracker would identify "tiny WG" sourced documents for
> the area and ADs would have a set of rules specific to those.
>
> This is sort of a half-formed thought.� It's still *mostly* within the
> way the IETF does things from the document point of view, but narrows
> the focus of a given tiny WG from the broad to the specific.� And lets
> us treat different topics - differently.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Mike
