[ogsa-wg] Proposal for restructuring teleconferences

[Andreas Savva]

* Background

At the moment OGSA-WG has 2 calls a week each scheduled for 2 hours.
Both of these calls are broadly structured along the lines of 1)
logistics/administration (early discussion, AI review, planning, etc);
2) one or more technical topics.

* Problem

Only a small core group of people join the calls for both the logistics
discussion and for all technical topics. Many other people may not have
a strong interest in the logistics portion of the calls, or may only
want to join the calls for certain technical topics.

Though the agendas have estimates for the duration of each agenda item
these durations are not 'hard' and it is difficult for participants to
time when to join a call if they just want to join a specific technical
topic. (And sometimes topics move around during agenda bashing anyway.)

* Proposal

The start times, frequency (twice a week) and overall duration (2 hours
each) of the calls stay the same. We subdivide each two hour call into 1
hour slots, for a total of 4 slots a week. Of these 4 one-hour slots (at
most) 1 slot a week will be for logistics/administration with the
remaining slots for technical discussion. The logistics slot will
alternate between Monday and Thursday each week. Only a single technical
topic may be scheduled to a slot. A topic may not exceed its slot
duration. If discussion on a topic finishes early or is canceled then
the next topic does not start until its scheduled slot time. In other
words the slots are independent of each other.

Assuming that for week 1 the topics are Workflow, EMS, and Info Model
then the schedule could be:
Monday   7 am(slot 1): Info Model
Monday   8 am(slot 2): Logistics
Thursday 10pm(slot 3): EMS
Thursday 11pm(slot 4): Workflow
(Times are in JST)

Week 2 would have the the Logistics slot on Thursday.

Suppose that in this example Thursday's EMS discussion finishes in 30
minutes, i.e., by 10:30pm JST. The Workflow discussion would not start
early; it would still start at 11:00pm JST. So the people who dialed in
for slot 3 and also want to join slot 4 could hang up, do some other
work, and dial back in after 30 minutes. If someone wants to join just
the Workflow discussion then they would not have to join the call from
10pm and wait.

-- 
Andreas Savva
Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd