I agree with some of your points, thanks, comments below,
On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 4:54 PM, Keith Moore
<moore(_at_)network-heretics(_dot_)com>wrote:
http://www.ietf.org/blog/2013/07/a-diverse-ietf/
Also, I wanted to let everyone know that tomorrow in the Administrative
Plenary, Kathleen Moriarty and Suresh Krishnan will be talking about what
they have uncovered so far in their efforts in the diversity design team.
I'm looking very much forward to their report. Their efforts will help us
understand where we have room to improve - often by much :-) - and what
kinds of actions we can take to improve our inclusiveness.
This is something that I've struggled with for years. A big part of the
"problem" (from one point-of-view) is that we've become so geographically
diverse in our choice of meeting sites that we've drastically raised the
cost of attending meetings on a regular basis - everyone has to travel a
lot to so (though people in North America still have an easier time of it).
And while there are clearly things that could be done to reduce meeting
costs, we'd be doing very well to reduce total trip cost by more than say
15%.
But earlier today I realized that the problem isn't just the cost of
attending meetings - it's the value that we get in return for those
meetings. I've been taking notes about how ineffectively we use our
meeting time. Most of what I've observed won't surprise anybody, but
here's a summary:
WG meeting sessions aren't scheduled to encourage discussion, but to
discourage it. At meeting after meeting, in several different areas, I
see the lion's share of the time devoted to presentations rather than
discussion.
Similarly, WG meetings generally aren't run in such a way to facilitate
discussion, but to discourage it. It's only Tuesday afternoon and I've
already lost count of how many times I've heard a meeting chair tell people
that they have to stop discussing things because there are more *
presentations* to do.
I think I was told that IESG is in charge of management of the meeting, so
we should ask it to clarify its position, WHY it was done that way?
However, I mentioned that time management was not done well in MANET WG in
previous meetings but no one cares of my comments. I hope your will get
through to IESG.
Rooms are set up not to facilitate discussion, but to discourage it. The
lights are dim, the chairs are facing forward rather than other
participants, the projector screen (not the person facilitating a
discussion, even if someone is trying to facilitate a discussion) is the
center of attention. The chairs are set so close together and with so
few aisles that it's hard for most of the attendees to get to the mics.
The "microphone discipline" which was intended to facilitate remote
participation ends up making discussion more difficult for everybody who
has paid to be on site.
I mentioned before that I was discouraged while I was remote participant,
but seems like even some f2f participants get that feelings from time to
time. The management of meetings should respond to your comments (not a
person but the body, which I expect IESG).
In the vast majority of WG sessions, everyone has his nose in a laptop.
(me included). This is because the information being presented at the
moment is generally not valuable enough to occupy the attendees' attention.
The attendees are there for one of two reasons - either they're just
trying to absorb some low-value information while still doing something
else that is more useful, or they're waiting for some opportunity to
actually interact - either within the context of that WG meeting or
afterward (perhaps because the best way to catch a particular person is
often to show up at a WG meeting that that person is attending.)
I usually will blame the IETF chairs to do better attraction to
participants including remote ones on jabber.
All of these things have been standard practice, in IETF and elsewhere,
for so long, that hardly anyone questions them. They have to be that way
because they're habit, and even if one or two people try to change things
(and I realize some ADs are trying), they have to contend with the mindless
habit-driven decisions of everyone else involved.
We can change meetings management, and I don't think there is a standard
practice for management of this meeting and others. We need an RFC for how
to best manage the meeting, which can update from time to time, however, I
mentioned to the venue selectors to be involved because selecting venue
affects the meeting management capacity.
Well, please excuse my candor, but f*ck habit. We can't be effective
engineers if we let bad habits continue to dictate how we work.
You keep repeating habit as it is not good, but I think we need it, but we
need management to make people's habit in the direction of the IETF habits
:-)
AB
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My expenses for this meeting are around USD 2.500. Some are paying more,
some less, but if we multiply average expense times the number of people
attending, that's a tremendous amount of money. Add that value is dwarfed
by the value of the people's time that is being spent here.
We are spending this time to travel to meet face-to-face, not so that we
can see PowerPoint all day for a week, but so we can interact.
Presentations, for the most part, do not help. They get in the way.
Visual aids can help to facilitate a discussion, but they should be as
brief as possible, and the room setup, meeting schedule, etc. should not be
optimized for the visual aids. They should be optimized for discussion.
For 80% of most WG meetings, the lights should be bright, the participants
should face each other. If there's a person facilitating the discussion
that person should be the center of attention. If we're going to use
microphones, the rooms should be set up to allow everyone in the room to
have easy access to them. We should have several microphones, again
facing each other, so that several people can have a conversation without
everyone having to queue up.
And maybe, in addition, we need to provide better places for people to
hang out and work while trying to get an opportunity to interact with
specific people. The terminal rooms are generally placed in
out-of-the-way corners, but the most effective places to interact with
people are in the hallways.
Keith