WG Chairs Forum 2021-11-30 (second session)

The draft agenda is:
-- Administrative and Agenda bash
-- Report on recent WG Chairs training
-- Update on WG Chairs site (chairs.ietf.org)
-- Update on emodir status and activities
-- Open discussion

...

Notes for the previous session are separate. (Karen/Rich might make an official merged minutes.)

Started about 23:05Z

Meeting is recorded. Notewell applies.

There was no agenda bashing.

Thanks to Bron (me!) for notes on training.

wgchairs training

Greg presented the slides about how the training went.

Comments: Bron
* Most important was "don't declare contentious consensus yourself" - co-chair is really important to cross-check with, and also include your AD.
* Best chairs are those with enough domain knowledge to understand the topic, but not strong opinions about "the correct way". Ideal if we can find those.

Videos are up on the chairs site too. Please watch if you're interested!

Jay: WG Chairs training was an IESG initiative, not started by the LLC.

chairs.ietf.org presentation

Bron: hopefully not everything changes every 18 months. Don't want chairs to have to spend all their time being up-to-date on the latest processes!

Greg: yeah, agree - though tools do change and it needs to be updated!

Mark Nottingham:
* on current chairs page - the view I get isn't what showed on slides. The navigation is really confusing, there's two different views.
* If we go ahead with this, it would be really good to consolidate everything into one place - having three places is confusing.
* Is this a wiki? Can we edit it?

Greg: yes, based on a wiki platform - in theory people could edit. Considering different models about how to do that. Question is: what model will work? Direct change control to everybody, or backend repository with pull requests?

Mark: a wiki model is probably good because it lowers the barrier to contributions. If everyone can edit, people will hesitate. Maybe need to have a dedicated pool of people to garden it. Just 3-4 people would probably do it.

Jay: wiki product -> can use OIDC plugin to datatracker to map editorial roles to datatracker. Other option -> can have mirrored into github with 2-way mirroring and use pull requests.

Jay: middle navigation pane will be removable in next version of product.

Lucas: it would be good to know when tasks are due - get bombarded with emails, but sometimes miss things. Get reminders in emails from ADs. Would be great to integrate with datatracker.

Greg: do you mean a calendar feed?

Lucas: haven't thought much about it. Ideally "these tasks need to be done still" - but even just a calendar would help.

Toerless:
* understand that LLC want to produce best work for the community. Please don't take away the opportunity for community to edit. Only lock down when necessary.
* in terms of what I'm missing: set of helpful slides for wg chairs (e.g. the code of conduct/notewell/mailing list behaviour)
* Have been looking at other WG chair decks and thinking about which of them would be useful to my own groups.
* Be useful to have a repository of those.

Karen: has been discussion about an onboarding kit which would provide a list of key responsibilities and key resources.

Toerless: yes, tricky to work out what's needed for new chairs, since some processes are only useful later - hard to learn when you don't need it yet. Also important to have ongoing things for existing chairs.
* if you try to put EVERYTHING in the onboarding kit, we'll overwhelm people.

Greg: agree with a lot of this. Think there are already some slide templates - please let me know if you think there are things that are useful to add to that. Idea is not to inhibit self-organisation, simply to provide support for what the community wants.

Karen: want to provide the information everybody needs, but if there's too much then people won't want to read it. Lots of old, not updated information.

Mark: agree, removing material is important! If we can do that, it's a huge help. This is why I worry about creating new places with even more new material, where the old material stays around as well.

Greg: will send questions out to the wgchairs list.

Karen; there's also authors.ietf.org - check it out!

emodir update

Tech deep-dives are much more detailed. The tech-talks are simpler.

Toerless:
* tech-talks are about the work of the IETF
* deep-dives are more about inputs to our work.
* good to try to get input from external entities -> other SDOs, industry, etc.
* Would be good to not have these efforts be "ships in the night" - the only thing people look at is the interim events calendar.

Karen: so far we've only done them in person - first step is to put together what we're going to do. If we create quality product, it will be useful.

Toerless: the tech talks can create a good role for bringing in newcomers.

end notes

Please engage on the lists! wgchairs and emodir.

Finished 23:58Z