Hi Keith,
On 31/07/2013 18:35, Keith Moore wrote:
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.
The last sentence there doesn't imply the previous one. I can
only speak for myself (and I'm not in Berlin), but I am often
looking at the slides, the draft and the jabber session while
listening to the speaker; no need to look up in order to pay
attention. Alternatively I am working on something else while
waiting for the topic I'm interested in to start; or I'm
checking whether it's time to move across to a clashing session.
Of course I have no idea what fraction of attendees are doing this.
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.
That's true; I am much more suspicious of "sense of the room"
consensus calls than I am of "sense of the mailing list" calls.
But pretty much all WG Chairs do what they're supposed to by
confirming the consensus on the list.
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.
The purpose is to communicate, including communication with
remote participants. Sometimes that means explaining things that
are, perhaps, badly explained in the draft - and getting back
comments that show what needs to be changed in the draft.
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.
I don't think it's fair to blame the tools. We should be asking
questions about how we use the tools.
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.
No, I mean that we have to deal with a very diverse community
and the style of discussion that was successful when you or I
first started coming to the IETF isn't going to come back. I
don't, unfortunately, have the magic formula.
On 31/07/2013 14:23, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
First, I observe that we already _have_ a great deal of written words:
the drafts. I continue to believe that altogether too much time in WG
meetings is spent "introducing", "presenting", or otherwise showing
off ideas in an existing draft to participants in the WG. I
acknowledge that (particularly in early stages of WG life, in topics
with a lot of different work, and in cross-WG presentations) these
"intro" presentations are a fact of life. But I think we are
extremely bad at holding the reigns on them.
In a WG meeting, I think such "intro" presentations about drafts
really can be kept to three pieces of information: the name of the
draft, a slogan describing the problem it is supposed to solve, and a
pointer to the beginning(s) of discussion thread(s) on the draft. If
the person promoting the draft can't give the elevator pitch, they
don't know their own draft well enough to summarize it and shouldn't
be presenting it.
That's a bit hard on people early in their IETF career who may
be among the most creative. So I disagree, when we are talking
about a piece of new work that has attracted interest on the
mailing list - we should be reasonably liberal at that stage.
Once. After that, I agree; repeat intros and non-substantive
discussions shouldn't be given meeting time. But I've been in
vey useful sessions where people have showed slides to
illustrate open issues, and got very productive feedback that
clarifies the options. I've been in other sessions where after a
few seconds I switch off after 2 slides and wait for the chairs
to call time.
<deleted several paragraphs that I strongly agree with>
...
Unfortunately, actually running meetings this way is a lot of work,
requires fairly careful planning, and requires an indifference to
nasty remarks on the part of presenters who would much rather listen
to themselves for 20 minutes than to others. But I think it'd make
for better meetings. (Yes, along with room layouts that were more
suited to getting people to the mic.)
I absolutely agree.
The old days are gone.
Yes, and we need to figure out how to use meeting time effectively
here in the new days. That effective use does not, I think, involve
expanding to fill all the time in the year with 20 minute low-content
presentations summarizing the draft that you can read in the span of
the time it takes to get through the presentation. (Perhaps I'm
wrong. Perhaps people find that the only time they have now to read
the drafts is during the presentation of the draft. I sure hope not.)
I agree here too. It really all depends on strong session
control by the chairs and a much stronger "this is not a
conference" message to participants.
Brian