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Re: what is the problem bis

2010-10-30 08:29:13
This discussion has a periodicy about 6 months. The premise is asinine, we 
can't go back to the early to mid 90s. 

Joel's widget number 2

On Oct 30, 2010, at 7:34, Keith Moore <moore(_at_)network-heretics(_dot_)com> 
wrote:

On Oct 30, 2010, at 4:01 AM, Glen Zorn wrote:

The second biggest thing that IETF could do to raise productivity in
meetings is to ban Internet use in meetings except for the purpose of
remote participation.

Harder to do & not clearly an improvement: it clear out meeting rooms a bit,
but on the other hand people who (for example) just read email in meetings
aren't really harming productivity too much.

I'm not sure about that.   If you're in a room with ten people who are 
participating in a discussion, it's easy to know whether those ten have 
achieved consensus among themselves.  Also, chances are good that each of 
those ten people has had a chance to ask questions, voice objections, or 
otherwise make contributions to the discussion.    

But if you're in a room with a hundred people (mostly staring at laptops) and 
only ten active participants, it's much harder to know whether there is 
consensus in the room.  And because there are so many people not obviously 
doing anything, those who have something to say are more likely to feel 
inhibited.  After all, most people are saying nothing (and not paying much 
attention), and we humans (okay, most of us) tend to take cues for what is 
socially acceptable by watching the behavior of those around us.

In the early-to-mid 1990s, IETF WG meetings used to be good places to 
actually discuss concerns about a document, and hash out potential solutions. 
 I remember several occasions.when a WG would schedule two meeting sessions 
in a week, one on Monday and another on late Wednesday or Thursday.  The 
Monday session would discuss the document(s) on the table, identify problems, 
suggest solutions.  Then a couple of WG participants and the authors would 
sit up late one night and revise the document in time for review at the 
second meeting (or at least, to be able to report to the second meeting what 
changes they had made, and get feedback on those).   I think it led to much 
faster convergence than what we usually see now.  And often the face-to-face 
review/revise/review sessions resulted in getting the document in a state 
where there were only a few nits remaining.  I don't think this would work 
the way we have meetings now, because there's nowhere nearly enough time for 
discussion
 .

Keith

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