On the 73attendees list we had a discussion about making face-to-face
meetings unnecessary through better technology.
In my opinion, that will be extremely hard to the point of being
impossible, for various reasons. (See the 73attendees discussion for a
bunch of them.) However, a more useful way forward would be to make
remote participation work a whole lot better.
At one point we had multicast video for a couple of tracks, which
didn't work very well. Now we have audo for all sessions, which works
much better (although when the audio quality is bad it takes a lot of
energy to listen and the lag makes reacting problematic). Jabber came
along before we had audio everywhere, giving rise to the notion that
someone should type in whatever happens in the meeting. I think that
use of jabber is problematic, but using jabber as a back channel for
additional discussion without interrupting the speaker only works on
occasion because too few people participate in jabber, or participate
in that way. And we don't use jabber anywhere in our process. I think
there's an opportunity there once we figure out how to use it well.
But that's just the state of affairs today. Bandwidth and hardware are
now cheap enough that we could revist video in the form of unicast
streaming, although that may take more person hours. Or maybe we can
create some other way to allow remote participants to see the slides
"live". I assume there are solutions for this, although they may not
be compatible with the quaint operating systems some participants
choose to use. Maybe we can hack something together ourselves? Export
slides to images or HTML, use some web magic to have the current one
on a web page, a volunteer triggers advancing the slides?
Something that I'd like to see is a way for remote participants to
talk back. I know a system that can do this called Talk Shoe exists
that allows people to make home brew call in radio shows. If it works
well enough, we could even do away with microphones in the meetings
and people can just speak into their laptops.
However, making progress here probably requires more than just
volunteer work. Would it make sense to charge a fee for remote
participation? At first, the extra money could be used to improve the
tools for this. If it them becomes popular it could become a new
revenue stream for the IETF.
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