Stay Home Meet Occasionally Online
charter-ietf-shmoo-01-04

The disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic may have been mitigated by the
time this group completes its work, but the experience of handling meeting
planning during the pandemic has proven that having community consensus guidance
at hand when dealing with novel conditions in the future is beneficial.

The disruption of the IETF's typical schedule of three mostly-in-person meetings
per year, is causing it to convert a number of such meetings to fully online
meetings. Yet discussions about the possibility of fully or mostly online
meetings had been occurring in the IETF community for years as a result of
general increases in remote attendance, improvements in web conferencing
services, concerns about the environmental impact of travel, and other reasons.
It might therefore happen that in-person meeting participation will become less
popular and that a significant fraction of participants will be remote.

The meeting planning activities that the IESG and the IETF LLC engage in would
benefit from IETF community consensus guidance concerning novel aspects raised
by these developments. The SHMOO working group is therefore chartered to
document high-level guidance and principles to the IESG and the IETF LLC.

The guidance and principles will concern the following:

• Meeting planning for fully online meetings. Similar to how RFC 8719
  establishes guidance for the regional rotation of in-person meetings, the IESG
  and the LLC would benefit from having community consensus guidelines about the
  time zone selection, meeting length in days, and other high-level scheduling
  aspects when an in-person meeting must be canceled. This work item is expected
  to be fulfilled with the publication of one or more BCPs.

• Meeting planning for mostly online, or “hybrid,” meetings. Meetings that have
  an in-person component but with significantly more remote participants than a
  mostly-in-person meeting need to be planned with community consensus
  guidelines, too. While trade-offs have often been addressed in favor of onsite
  attendees, the IESG and LLC would benefit from having community consensus on
  high-level guidance about the organization of such hybrid meetings, regarding
  such things as the meeting schedule, the meeting length in days,
  acceptable limitations on the maximum allowed or minimum expected onsite
  attendees, whether and how to schedule and prioritize among onsite activities
  such as side meetings, the terminal room, the code lounge, and others, and
  other scheduling aspects.

• Determinations about the meeting fee structure for remote participation. Since
  remote participation in mostly-in-person meetings has historically been free,
  IETF LLC and IESG decisions about the meeting fee structure for remote
  participation need to be informed by community guidelines. This work item is
  expected to be fulfilled with the publication of one or more BCPs. Suggestions
  for changing the IETF's overall funding model are out of scope.

• The cadence of meeting scheduling and the mix of mostly-in-person, hybrid and
  fully online meetings going forward as well as the format of meetings, e.g.,
  use of interims compared to components and length of the plenary meeting
  (week). The working group is expected to document the expected future meeting
  cadence and format as a BCP if consensus emerges to depart from the existing
  cadence of three mostly-in-person meetings per year. Notably, any such
  guidance will not become actionable until 3-4 years after it achieves
  consensus, given the length of the IETF meeting planning cycle.

The work of SHMOO is expected to produce high-level principles, not detailed
operational plans. The goal is to produce guidelines for the IESG and the IETF
LLC to operationalize while ensuring they have substantial flexibility to
continue to deliver and evolve the IETF meeting experience to best serve IETF
participants and the Internet community at large. Specifications of details
concerning cancellation criteria, meeting technologies, and online meeting
agenda formats and content are out of scope. Aside from fee structure,
discussion of financial aspects of IETF meetings and changes to RFC 8713
are both out of scope. Scheduling guidance for interim meetings is out of scope.