Hello Douglas,
Dear Josh,
I agree. A single day fee should also be considered in conjunction with the
increased status of remote participation underwritten by a much smaller
remote meeting fee. It seems there is a general reluctance to consider
schemes aimed at capturing face-to-face meetings in a realtime fashion
permitting moderated realtime interaction with selected network entities.
Experiments with things like WebEx and others involve a fair amount of
network resources or they offer poor results. An audio/video bridge suitable
for many simultaneous participants is difficult to solve in a generic manner.
The real question is simultaneous participation in conjunction with
telephone bridges really necessary?
As regards remote participation 'experiments', we have been working for years
on trying and improving remote participants involvement and interactivity at
IETF meetings (starting with IETF80 in Prague). You can have a look at
[http://ietf8X.conf.meetecho.com/ (0 <= X <= 7)] to get an idea of such work.
Setting up a dedicated low cost device to manage video projectors,
microphones, and PA systems for a single moderated inbound access should
supplant much of the complexity. By not permitting multiple video/audio
sources and requiring presentation being available in the cloud prior to the
meetings, issues of distribution and audio quality are removed. Such an
approach will necessitate greater meeting discipline to ensure only those at
an active microphone are recognized, and that presenters both local and
remote are permitted control of their presentation.
With respect to this point, we proposed an experiment at IETF83:
http://ietf83.conf.meetecho.com/index.php/UMPIRE_Project. Discussions about
this specific topic can be found in the vmeet mailing list, as well as in the
once-supposed-to-become-official RPS document from Paul Hoffman
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-genarea-rps-reqs-08.
Developing this approach would offer a number of benefits extending well
beyond that of the IETF since this is a common problem. Much of the ongoing
wok related to HTML5 facilitate standardizing the needed APIs. There are
many fairly powerful systems using dual core Atom processors available well
below $300. These systems should be able to handle audio using USB adapters
and source video presentations accessed from the cloud. A fallback operation
should be able to carry meetings forward completely from the cloud "as if"
moderators and participants were present locally. In other words, treat loss
of the Internet at the venue as being equivalent to being denied access to
the physical venue and include this requirement in venue arrangements.
Those traveling thousands of miles already confront many uncertainties.
Those that elect to participate remotely should be afforded greater certainty
of being able to participate when problems occur at local venues or with
transportation. Increasing participation without the expense of the brick
and mortar and travel should offer long term benefits and increased fairness.
Agreed.
Cheers,
Simon
Regards,
Douglas Otis
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Simon Pietro Romano
Universita' di Napoli Federico II
Computer Engineering Department
Phone: +39 081 7683823 -- Fax: +39 081 7683816
e-mail: spromano(_at_)unina(_dot_)it
<<Molti mi dicono che lo scoraggiamento Ë l'alibi degli
idioti. Ci rifletto un istante; e mi scoraggio>>. Magritte.
oooO
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