This discussion has a periodicy about 6 months. The premise is asinine, we
can't go back to the early to mid 90s.
What's asinine is to dismiss out-of-hand something has worked well in the past.
The only reason we can't change the way we have discussions is that too many
people are in the habit of thinking we have to do things the way we are doing
them. To anyone with an engineering background, that's not a reason. (and
what are the rest of you doing here anyway?) :)
We had serious scaling problems with IETF in the late 1990s and we had to adapt
because of the huge number of attendees we had. But attendance is way down
since then.
Powerpoint inhibits thinking. As it's nearly always used, it inhibits
discussion. It makes IETF meetings very expensive, because they tremendously
lower the value returned in exchange for the money invested to get people
there. People who actually want to get work done have less incentive to attend
IETF meetings than they used to. So the people who attend IETF meetings these
days are less likely to be those with the best technical talent, and more
likely to be "goers" who are just there to tout the company line and/or to
watch what other people are doing.
The amount of harm caused by IETF's overuse of powerpoint is huge.
Keith
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