Here's another post out of left field.
It seems to me that in order to solve the problem of remote participation in
meetings, we need to decide what it means to participate in a meeting. It
seems to me that the important characteristic of a meeting is that one
person speaks at a time. In WG meetings, one person presents and then
others que up at a mic for comments/questions. The issues I've seen only
relate to the comment/question part.
One group of comments deals with the difficulty of the current jabber setup
to allow comments/questions to become the focus, the "one person speaking".
Perhaps this could be worked out with some kind of enforced protocol, such
that mic speakers' questions/comments are interleaved with jabber
questions/comments in some way. I think, though, it would be harder to
follow threads of thought in this way, especially if there are many jabber
questions/comments that come in on a specific topic while mic speakers start
to follow a different issue. Some kind of policing where issues are
discussed sequentially might help, but might be too restricting. Maybe it
would be better to take thread discussions off the mic at some point and use
some kind of forum software?
A second problem is the use of jabber to discuss offline what speakers are
discussing. It seems to me that this is a direct contradiction to what is
supposed to occur in a meeting, where one person speaks at a time.
I've never used Webex, so I can't comment on its applicability. It seems to
me that jabber is not the right tool for remote meeting participation. It
probably works fine for meeting monitoring along with the audio, but seems
to fall short for remote meeting participation without some kind of enforced
meeting protocol. Is what Melinda described enough? Should there be some
kind of media Sargent-At-Arms enforcing Robert's 21st Century Rules?
Jabber seems to be important for the scribe task. That's not something to
be taken lightly. In fact, the whole issue of what the meeting record
should be is taken too lightly, in my opinion. Should it be the audio with
scribe comments, plus the Jabber record? If that's the case, a person
looking up the meeting would need the audio and the scribe/jabber comments.
Should it be the scribe notes, which can be undependable, even with the
jabber comments? Should we be looking at voice-to-text more seriously?
Seems to me that this is a universal problem that someone should have
solved. If not, it's a great opportunity.
-----Original Message-----
From: ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
[mailto:ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org] On Behalf Of
Thomas Nadeau
Sent: Monday, October 24, 2011 7:49 AM
To: SM
Cc: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: Requirement to go to meetings
At 05:52 24-10-2011, Marshall Eubanks wrote:
As jabber scribe, I view part of my responsibility as relaying questions
asked on jabber (if no one else is doing so). For groups that have
secretaries, I suggest that that be part of the secretary's
responsibilities.
The secretary is busy taking minutes. That doesn't mean that the
secretary cannot draw attention if someone is asking a question on Jabber.
The audio recording is a handy supplement when the speaker cannot be
identified or to cross-check the details.
In my experience that unfortunately happens about %10 of the time.
We need some way for remote participants to virtually stand in the mic queue
so they get called upon and allowed to not only ask a question, but to
follow-up - especially if the presenter needs clarification on the question.
As for remote participation, if you do not know anyone in the room you are
going to be ignored. That's an IETF feature that also applies for people
who attend meetings. There are little things that can help remote
participants follow what is going on. Melinda Shore mentioned some of them.
Most of the fixes are non-technical.
Jabber/etc... are really bubblegum and bailing wire solutions. I
have been forced to skip meetings in the past due to budget issues, and can
tell you that relying on others to proxy for you just doesn't work. Despite
knowing someone in the room, you are assuming they are not busy trying to
work themselves either participating in the meeting, writing documents, or
whatever. I've tried Skyping into meetings, jabber, whatever and it just
doesn't work well because the people that ultimately must speak for you
often can't. Also, you assume people know someone well enough to ask for
them; which is asking a lot especially for new people.
The best approach I've witnessed (and used many times) is WebEx
where you can explicitly request to ask a question by virtually raising your
hand, and then when the chair recognizes you, you can ask your own question.
You can then interact with the presenter - and if the chairs are being
sophisticated, they could project your face on a screen. You can also use
this mechanism as a means when gauging consensus where the chair(s) ask for
a feeling of the room and for people to raise their hands.
--Tom
If you do not go to meetings, it's unlikely that you will be able to
follow the BoF you are interested in. There may be times when decisions are
taken during a meeting. It is not worth the nit-picking if the outcome
won't change.
Regards,
-sm
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