On Jul 30, 2013, at 10:38 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
It's been pointed out before that in a group with very diverse languages,
written words are usually better understood than speech. It's a fact of life
that you can't have a full-speed cut-and-thrust discussion in a group
of 100 people, half of whom are speaking a foreign language. Sitting in
a circle does not fix this.
Yes, but most of the people in a typical WG meeting today aren't really
participating in the meeting anyway. They're not contributing input, they're
not paying attention. Their noses are in laptops. It's hard to tell how many
of them would be participating if the meeting were more useful, but the very
fact that the room contains so many nonparticipants is itself a deterrent to
getting work done in the meeting. If nothing else, whenever someone tries to
get a sense of the room, it's very misleading - people may be humming when they
haven't even been listening, or it may appear that there's no significant
support for something when there really is significant support among those who
are interested in the topic.
Also, remote participants need full text slides; the soundtrack simply
isn't enough.
You seem to be assuming that the purpose of WG meetings is to have
presentations. I emphatically disagree.
If we decide to make WG meetings fora for interaction and discussion, we can
adopt or invent disciplines and tools to better accommodate interaction and
discussion between people of diverse languages and including those at other
locations. But the disciplines and tools that we've adopted at the moment are
designed to accommodate an audience, not active participants.
The old days are gone.
It sounds like you are saying that IETF is doomed to become irrelevant because
it's stuck in habits that do not work. I hope you're wrong about that.
Keith