Attending C++ Standards Committee Meetings During a Pandemic

This is an exposition of my personal experience attending WG21 over the years and the impact the COVID-19 pandemic had. It is a mostly direct copy-paste of a Reddit post I made on 2021-11-08 (https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/qpdh05/attending_c_standards_committee_meetings_during_a/).

This paper is a result of a request from a committee chair to share my experience as expressed in the Reddit post. My only goal in presenting this view point is to advocate for the increased access of involvement in WG21 that the pandemic has precipitated. What follows below is the full, but cleaned up, version of the original post.

I’ve been thinking about some comments made at the recent CppCon 2021 "C++ Standards Committee - Firesiade Chat Panel" and I’m somewhat concerned about some of the opinions on the impact of remote versus in-person meetings for the C++ Standards Committee (WG21).

Some history about my WG21 involvement…​ I’ve been attending meetings since 2007. How many meetings I attend has varied over time. This post is mainly about why my attendance has varied. And why I consider the move to virtual meetings spurred by the pandemic as a net positive. My attendance from 2007 to 2015 was limited to a total of two (2) meetings for a net total of 3 days in 8 years. My attendance from 2015 until the pandemic started was about ten (10) remote meetings per year and a total of two (2) in-person meetings (although only a total of 4 days). And finally during the pandemic it’s averaging about 2 remote meetings a week that I can attend.

As you can see there’s a gigantic increase in participation during the pandemic for me. Why the big change? Well, let me back up a little and explain the calculus as to how I can attend meetings. My day job is spent doing consulting developing AAA games for large clients but in a small private company. My current night and weekend time is spent with family, maintaining open-source tools and libraries, and duties in the C++ Alliance board, usually in that order. Before my current job I ran my own very low budget consulting company, spent time with family, and did open-source maintenance.

Some key aspects of that as it pertains to WG21 meetings: My employers, present and past, do not pay me to attend WG21 meetings. I obviously prefer to spend most free time with my family. My personal hobby is doing open-source work as it helps keep me educated in my profession but, as a hobby, it doesn’t pay. Hence the resources I spend in WG21 are “on my own dime”. That is, going to an in-person meeting has disadvantages for me:

Contrast this to the benefits of attending the remote meetings and related participation:

In addition to those directly parallel benefits I also find that:

You may now be wondering.. What are the downsides to remote meetings or upsides to in-person meetings? From my point of view there is only one: you get to socially interact with other like minded programmers over dinner and drinks when in-person. And guess what.. I find that conferences are better suited for that than WG21 meetings.

In summary, I only see advantages to remote WG21 meetings. And the comments by the WG21 members during the fireside chat make me worry that the remote meeting necessity of the pandemic will come to an end. And people like me, who are at a disadvantage in attending in-person meetings, will be once again pushed to the sidelines.

I’m thankful to the WG21 chairs that have managed to make it possible for me to attend and be productive in WG21 during the pandemic. And I’m publicly pleading, please, please, do not abandon the opportunities that remote meetings provide to underrepresented C++ programmers like myself when the pandemic is over.

For context here are some quotes from the Fireside Chat on this that I found particularly problematic in characterizing either the benefits of in-person meetings or the detriments of remote meetings.