Network connectivty is kinda hard...
This might be heresy, but I continue to wonder if all of that effort put
into multicasting meetings is actually being put to good use. Last I
knew, multicast connectivity was spotty all over the globe, the tools
for using the multicast were hard to come by for many platforms, and
the quality of the experience for folks actually trying to use multicast
to participate in a meeting varied from barely usable to completely
unusable.
I'm very supportive of both trying to deploy multicast and trying to
make it possible to participate in IETF meetings from remote locations.
But if the current effort isn't working, maybe we need to try something
different.
Or as a first step perhaps we could take some concrete and relatively
easy steps to determine how well things are working:
1. poll WG chairs from the last IETF to see how many people contributed
things in real time from remote locations.
2. if we have a list of email addresses of multicast participants from
the last IETF, ask those folks how well it worked for them.
3. for the next meeting, update the IETF web pages to describe how to
attend the meeting via multicast - where to get the tools for your
particular platform, how to determine whether your ISP supports
multicast, and so on.
Keith