stds-802-mobility: Planning For the January Interim Meeting

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All,

At the end of the November meeting we had reserved an hour to discuss future meeting planning. Unfortunately, there was no discussion of this subject other than my presentation. I realize that the hour was late and many wanted to go home. By not planning we delay the completion of our work. My recommendation is that we make up for our omission with email discussion. Let this email serve as the initial input.

1) We never addressed my proposal that the interim meeting be authorized to move the work of our PAR forward. I now propose that we organize our January meeting with formal votes to progress our work. We must plan on posting the meeting minutes as soon as possible after the January interim meeting, and then engage in email discussion on issues where non-attendees need further background on the reasons for various votes, or to present other opinions. When we meet in March, we can vote on approving the resolutions that passed during the interim meeting during our Monday opening session. In this way, we will begin our March session with solid progress already under our belts.

2) There is great interest in hearing all the presentation made and being involved in every discussion and every decision. However, we are too large a group and have too many issues to tackle them in a serial manner. We have been working on issues far too slowly using our serial process. We must break up into smaller focus groups to resolve issues, and then come back as a single working group to discuss, possibly modify, and hopefully approve the recommendations with most of the detailed discussion occurring in the smaller groups. I recommend that we meet as a single group on Monday and Thursday and have breakout sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday. Having three parallel sessions will greatly speed up our progress. Although meeting room assignments have been made and, I assume, we are set to meet in one room for the four days, it is not too late to have Classic Consulting accommodate a request to have us meet in 3 smaller rooms rather than one large room on Tuesday and Wednesday.

3) There seems to be a reluctance to move forward with technology proposals before the requirements document is complete. This serialization of tasks is already seriously affecting our schedule. We need to be encouraging groups to come forward with solid proposals for our technology (detailed documents supplemented with the power point presentation to the group) and be ready to establish a cut-off date as to when we will accept the last proposal for consideration to be incorporated into our standard. I recommend that groups with technologies they would like to see in the standard work on your detailed documents and presentations. If possible, request time to make a presentation at Vancouver. Note that with any proposal there will be questions that will cause you to go back, do more work, and then return with a better and more complete proposal. Therefore, it is to your advantage to make your proposals early, and to have the time to improve them before the final technology choices are made.

4) We need to establish an official WG schedule, include it with our WG documents, and work toward that schedule. Allocate an hour time during the January meeting to discuss schedule. My first inputs to get the discussion moving are:

a. Cutoff for accepting new proposals – July ’04 plenary meeting

b. 1^st draft out for 30 day comment September 20, 2004 (assumes late August interim meeting).

c. Last feature or capability addition to the draft November 22, 2004

d. Begins first WG ballot on entire draft, December 1, 2004

e. Last technical change (except to correct known problems) March 17, 2005

f. Begin LMSC ballot November 2005

g. Standard Issued June 2006

I welcome discussion on alternative dates. However, we do need to establish an official 802.20 schedule that is not too detailed, but has key checkpoints.

5) Our January interim meeting is just over a month away. Those who are working on presentations, or expect to be, should be making early requests to the chair indicating the presentation topic, its purpose, and the time you believe you will need for the presentation and follow-up discussion. If the purpose of your presentation is to move the group to action, then consider having the final slide of your presentation the formal motion you would like to have the WG consider. Of course, if there were multiple presentations on the same topic, then the chair would normally group those presentations and withhold the WG consideration of associated motions until the set of presentations on that issue has been heard.

6) Going beyond the January interim, we need to be organizing our plenary sessions to maximize the amount of working time available. There are 802 Working Groups that meet from Sunday through Friday of each plenary session. I do not recommend such draconian measures. However, I recommend that we do our meeting planning based on the expected availability of enough people from Monday morning, to as late as is required on Thursday. The implication is to schedule one or more breakout sessions to work on specific issues on Monday morning, bringing the results of those meetings to the WG sometime after the opening plenary. The Thursday session should be scheduled till 5:00pm or when all business is complete, whether that be 4:00pm, 6:00pm, or 11:00pm. We can also save an hour or so by either establishing the joint wireless opening plenary as a mandatory session for 802.20, and dispense with the repetition of topics covered there, or by not participating in that session, and using all that time for 802.20 work. Having the session optional and then repeating the information for the sake of those that did not go is a waste of time, with its associated loss of progress.

Thank you for taking the time to read through this email. I now seek your thoughts and contributions, whether in support of, in addition to, or in opposition to the recommendations I have posted here.