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Re: presenting vs discussion in WG meetings (was re:Remote Participation Services)

2013-02-15 15:42:53

On 2/15/2013 9:46 AM, George, Wes wrote:
[WEG] Perhaps it would be helpful to make an informal recommendation
to WG chairs (via the wiki, for example) that generally they should
carve each request for agenda time roughly in half, with a hard limit
of $speaker_time/2


You are looking for an objective mechanism to handle a subjective issue. It's a natural desire, but it's doomed to fail.

The requirement is to use meeting time well. Yes, part of 'well' is to severely limit the occurrence of tutorials. But a "presentation" might be highly appropriate or highly inappropriate, depending on its actual content.

For example, one type of presentation is to perform a careful expose', delineating design choices. In form, it can look quite a bit like a tutorial. One time I helped resolve a seriously deadlocked and essential wg debate by just such an exercise. I did a point-by-point comparison of the features (functions, benefits, costs, limitations, etc.) between two choices. The powerpoint slides showed a 3-column table with each row listing a salient aspect. By the end, the group developed reasonably good rough consensus towards one choice. My effort was a 'presentation' but every minute of it was useful and, I believe, appropriate.

We need chairs and everyone else to be clear about what is useful and what is not and to then allocate (and enforce) time accordingly. This is a matter of specific wg context and presentation content.

That doesn't happen algorithmically.


d/
--
 Dave Crocker
 Brandenburg InternetWorking
 bbiw.net