On 11/12/12 8:32 AM, Riccardo Bernardini wrote:
Let me add my own experience here, related to a different
environment (scientific conferences), but also very similar to yours.
Usually, if I go to a conference it is because I have a paper to
present, but that it is not the only payback of being there. There
is the hall (or bar) talking with old colleagues of mine, there is
the casual meeting of other researchers (old and young) working in my
field with which I exchange experiences, point of view and maybe a
new collaboration can be born. Actually, I do not know how this
could be replicated with an online tool.
Well, I think it's important to be clear that IETF meetings are working
meetings and they exist largely to progress documents, so the goals are
somewhat different. I think that at this point I've done the remote
participation thing as much as anybody and from my perspective the main
problem is not the tools but that the quality of the experience varies
enormously with the attention/skill of the session chairs. Some are
attentive to remote participants, some don't even bother to acknowledge
we exist. There's a WG chairs wiki page on facilitating remote
participation at
http://wiki.tools.ietf.org/group/wgchairs/wiki/RemoteParticipation.
I've also had very good experiences using email to make the kind of
contacts you've mentioned - something comes up in a session and sending
out-of-band email directly to the person who said something interesting.
In-person participation brings with it benefits that remote
participation doesn't (and is mandatory for people in certain roles).
But the cost-benefit tradeoff? I'm not sure, frankly.
Melinda