Re: Remote Participation Services

On 02/11/2013 11:45 PM, Joel M. Halpern wrote:
> Keith, you seem to be asking for something (discussion, wit no 
> presentation), that has never happened in the WGs I have attended in 
> the last 20 years.  Even the WG sessions that had the best, most 
> useful, discussions, generally started with a presentation of the 
> topic and issue.
> Such initial presentation is usually strongly helped by clear bullets 
> that everyone can follow to keep straight what is being discussed.
> yes, many of the briefings (here and elsewhere) are people reading 
> their slides.  yes, Powerpoint seems to make this worse in the way the 
> tool is designed.  But the issues seems to me not to e slides.
> If I had to guess, it is a combination of folks lacking confidence to 
> discuss their material, folks doing what they have seen, and the 
> patterns the tools encourage.  There almost certainly are other factors.
> If you could assume that all 10 people you were talking to were fully 
> up to speed on the topic, and had not lost context to the other 10 WG 
> sessions they have been preparing for, and if we knew how to hold 
> conversations effectively in rooms with 50+ people, and ...
> Yes, we should be looking for encouraging, and thanking / rewarding, 
> those people who use their slots to briefly present and then engage in 
> conversation with the WG.
> But lets not invent a fictional past in which this was some how 
> natural, or even the norm.
I remember IETF before PowerPoint.

Yes, people wrote topics or drew diagrams on transparencies that were 
projected for viewing within the room.   But (perhaps because preparing 
such materials was laborious) I don't recall the majority of WG time 
being devoted to reading things from those slides.  I do recall lots of 
fruitful discussions.
Keith

p.g. Admittedly, there were other differences when I first started 
participating in IETF.  e.g.  Most people didn't have laptops, and the 
rooms didn't have wireless Internet, so you didn't see meeting rooms 
full of people playing solitare, reading email, and/or browsing the web 
and not paying attention.