Your IETF week now starts earlier than before, in more ways than one. The IESG typically meets Sunday morning, so you should plan on arriving the night before or very, very early Sunday. The IESG also meets for breakfast on many mornings (sometimes alone and sometimes with the IAB). If you have dietary needs, the Secretariat will try to meet them, though you should probably expect them to meet them the same way every day. Morning breakfasts involve coffee, tea, coke, and diet coke; if you need other stimulants, you will probably need to provide them for yourself. The breakfasts review what's coming up in the week (including BoFs), discussion of major issues that arise during meetings in the week, and occasionally handle matters that got stuck during telechats. As face-to-face time, they are a critical part of creating the personal relationships that go along with the formal mechanisms of IESG interaction; in addition to fellow ADs, this time can connect you to the Secretariat, the IAB, the RFC Editor Staff, and the IANA staff.
Prior to any IETF week, you'll normally be involved in scheduling the working groups in your area. This is now done through a tool, and it is largely managed through the working group chairs. You may, however, wish to influence the schedule in a couple of ways. If you have a group which needs a lot of hallway time prior to a particular item being considered, you may wish to ask that it be scheduled late in the week. If you have a group which is requesting multiple slots, you may want to work with the chairs to be sure that the work style need gets captured. If a working group needs multiple slots, expect one of them to be on Friday. For some working groups a day or so between meetings provides time for hallway and design team meetings to get things done. For others, it means a context-reload that a single long block could have avoided. Work with the chairs on that as much as you can, and help them to recognize that the number of conflicts makes the scheduling process very hard.
ADs will normally attend every working group for which they are advisors and will usually attend the other meetings in their area which do not conflict with their working groups. This means you are pretty unlikely to have free time during the week's meeting times. If you do, attening area meetings is a good way to get a quick, survey-level view of the landscape in the relevant area. Scheduling side meetings during the IETF can happen, and there is a dedicated IESG meeting room available for small group meetings (and you can reserve it for a small group, even if you won't attend the meeting-, but please be sensitive to others' needs). ADs also attend the plenary meetings; the format of those change periodically, but being available to hear community input is extremely useful even if the IESG isn't on stage.
Lunches, dinners, and breaks are commonly used for short meetings; scheduling them in advance is common, and keeping track of those early is a good thing. Holding onto a few of those for decompression time is a good thing. Decompression time in the evening (dinner break and after) is very useful, but the breakfast meeting starts early!
The content of this page was last updated on 2009-10-08. It was migrated from the old Trac wiki on 2023-02-17.