Re: IETF 63 On-line Survey

On Thursday, August 18, 2005 10:49:56 AM -0500 "James M. Polk" 
<jmpolk(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com> wrote:
> At 06:25 AM 8/18/2005 -0400, Jeffrey Altman wrote:
> > In my working group I would say that a bigger factor related to the
> > improved ability to hold a technical discussion were the four floating
> > microphones.
> floating mics are a bad idea for many reasons - each getting worse with
> room and or audience size increasing.
Your hypothetical problems notwithstanding, in _actual practice_, we found 
them to be extremely useful in KITTEN and in some other sessions.  In the 
case I remember, there were a total of six microphones in the room - a 
table mic for the chair, a wireless clip-on for the current speaker, two 
floor mics, and two wireless mics that could be passed around.
In actual usage we treated the "speaker" mic the same as the others, which 
effectively gave us an easy way to have a discussion in which 2-3 people 
speak frequently and many others speak less often.  If you're not one of 
the 2-3, you get up and go to the mic.  If/when it becomes clear that you 
are, you get a wireless mic (or multiple people sitting near each other 
share one).
For this case, the floor control problem is the same as that for an 
in-person conversation between a group of people without microphones of any 
kind.  People can talk at the same time, interrupt each other, etc., and 
you mostly have to expect everyone to behave reasonably.  This is different 
from the problem for a multi-user conferencing system, where there may be 
technical reasons why it is desirable to have exactly one designated 
speaker at a time, rather than mixing audio from all sources.

I know the audio setup is largely determined by what the venue can/will 
provide, but I would _very_ much like to see something similar to what we 
had in Paris; that is, a mixture of 1-2 fixed floor mics and at least 2-3 
floating wireless mics.  This venue had plenty of things to complain about, 
but this was one aspect which I found superior to other sites we've been to.

-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <jhutz+(_at_)cmu(_dot_)edu>
  Sr. Research Systems Programmer
  School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility
  Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA


_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf