On Monday, January 02, 2006 02:42:41 PM -0500 John C Klensin
<john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com> wrote:
Finally, there is a longstanding and more or less explicit
decision in the IETF community to keep the costs of
participation as low as possible and, in particular, to not have
costs imposed by the SDO become a bar to effective
participation. It is getting harder --much harder than I
personally considerable-- to participate effectively in the IETF
without ever setting foot in a meeting, but it is still possible
to do so.
Actually, I think that recently we've been getting _better_ in that regard,
and I hope the trend continues:
- For several meetings, we've had jabber rooms for every session.
- More recently, we've also has streaming audio for every session.
- Chairs now have the ability to put slides online _during_ sessions.
Each of these tools has seen steadily increasing usage since its
introduction. These days, the chairs in nearly every session make an
effort to find jabber scribes to report on the meeting and take questions
from remote participants in real time. People are getting better about
always using the microphones, though we have a long way to go in this area.
And, I know some groups have made an effort to get slides and presentations
online before or during the meetings, even before the tools became
available to conveniently do so in a standard place.
As a working group chair, I've conducted meetings in which key participants
used these tools to effectively participate in a meeting without being
physically present. Of course, it doesn't scale to having _everyone_
participate remotely, or even a large fraction of very active participants,
and I don't really think that would be desirable. However, it is possible
for large numbers of people to watch, listen, and even make an occaisonal
comment. I think we're doing better on this front than we have in many
years.
-- Jeff
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