Re: procedural question with remote participation

Regarding the need for presentations early to get them translated, and the 
"non-Procrustean"[1] improvement of having cutoffs for presentations of new 
drafts: new drafts are still submitted 2 weeks in advance, and ISTM that a real 
non-Procrustean tactic would be to let the WG chairs do their jobs.  If you've 
got a 40 page slide-deck chock full of text, giving a detailed tutorial on some 
mechanism, it's a different situation from the norm. (and I'd argue you're 
probably doing it wrong, but ymmv)  But those appear to be the exceptions, not 
the rule; and WG chairs can handle push-back for exceptions if they need to.  
We don't have to create new draconian rules.

But for the general case, the truth is that Fuyou Maio is right - you really do 
need to be able to parse English quickly to truly participate effectively in an 
IETF physical meeting.  And you need to be reasonably swift in either reading 
it, or following the speaker's words.  It's not nice to say, but it's the 
truth.  Real-time direct human communication is why we have the physical 
meetings to begin with, instead of only mailing lists and virtual meetings. 
(and for cross-wg-pollination, and for cookies)

The good news is the mailing lists and drafts themselves are in plain ascii 
which should make language translation software easier to use, and the physical 
meetings are voice/video/jabber recorded so you can get them translated 
afterwards to listen/watch/read, and once you do you can always raise 
objections/issues in email afterwards and try to reverse any decisions made in 
physical meetings.  That's better than any other international standards body 
I've ever participated in. (IEEE, 3GPP, ETSI, ATIS)  Some have a more strict 
submissions in-advance policy, but even for them their physical meetings 
require high-level English abilities to participate effectively, in practice.  
I don't see a realistic alternative to that, while still getting things 
accomplished in a timely manner.

It's easy to say those things since I'm a native English speaker [2], and not a 
nice concept in general... but if we're honest with ourselves I think we have 
to recognize the unvarnished truth.  Obviously there are exceptions - the 40 
page slide-deck full of text is an exception.  But those appear to be uncommon 
cases, afaict.

-hadriel
[1] It's ironic you use the word "Procrustean" in an email about non-native 
English speakers needing translation.  If you'd asked me what the word meant, 
I'd have guessed it either meant those who enjoyed the edges of bread or pizza, 
or those who advocate Earth plate tectonics theory.

[2] well, technically English is not my native language, but I learned it at a 
young enough age to cover that up... mostly.



On Aug 4, 2013, at 7:10 PM, Spencer Dawkins 
<spencerdawkins(_dot_)ietf(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:

> On 8/4/2013 3:10 PM, Hadriel Kaplan wrote:
> > OK, I'll bite.  Why do you and Michael believe you need to have the slides 1 
> > week in advance?
> >
> > You have the agenda and drafts 2 weeks in advance.  The slides aren't 
> > normative.  Even when they're not about a draft in particular, the slides 
> > are not self-standing documents.  They're merely to help with discussion.
> >
> > Not getting the slides at all is a different matter - but 7 days in advance 
> > is counter-productive.  They should be as up-to-date as practical, to take 
> > into account mailing list discussions. [or at least that's how I justify my 
> > same-day, ultra-fresh slides]
> >
> > If you need to have them on the website 7 days in advance, you really need 
> > to get a faster Internet connection. ;)
> I'm a TSV AD, but I'm sending this note wearing no hat (someone last week 
> asked me why I wasn't wearing a cowboy hat if I was from Texas - no, not even 
> a cowboy hat).
>
> I read through the discussion on this, and I'm only responding to Hadriel 
> because his post was the last one I saw before replying. Thank you all for 
> sharing your thoughts.
>
> YMMV ("Your Mileage May Vary"), but I have been sponsored for several years 
> by a company that sends a sizable number of folks to IETF who are not native 
> English speakers. Having slides early helps non-native English speakers (I 
> believe I've heard that some slide decks are translated into other languages, 
> although I wouldn't know, because I read the slides in English).
>
> After his first IETF (Paris/63), Fuyou Maio said to me, "understanding spoken 
> English is the short board in the water barrel" (the idea being that your 
> effectiveness at the IETF is limited by your ability to quickly parse spoken 
> English). The folks I talk to get plenty of chances to translate spoken 
> English during Q&A, and don't need additional practice translating the 
> presentations in real time. Yes, I know people say things that aren't on 
> their slides, but if what's on their slides doesn't help other people 
> understand what they are saying, they probably shouldn't be using those 
> slides.
>
> In the mid-2000s, I remember an admonition for chairs to write out the 
> questions the chairs are taking a hum on, to accommodate non-native English 
> speakers (and to write out all the questions before taking the first hum, to 
> accommodate anyone who agrees with the second choice but prefer the fourth 
> choice when they hear it after humming).
>
> I'm having a hard time making the "a week early or you don't present" case 
> for slide cutoffs, because we DO talk during the meeting week - and in groups 
> RTCWeb, with a Thursday slot and a Friday slot, we had time to talk a lot. If 
> the cutoff was for presentations of new individual drafts, that's a different 
> question, so there might be some way to make non-Procrustean improvements(*).
>
> I agree with the "chairs looking at slides for sanity" point. I'm remembering 
> more than one working group where we chairs got presentations that included 
> about a slide per minute for the time allocated to the topic - noticing that 
> even one day before saved us from the ever-popular "we can't talk about this 
> presentation because we don't have time" moment.
>
> During IETF 87, I had reason to consult the proceedings for the 
> non-workgroup-forming RUTS BOF ("Requirements for Unicast Transport/Sessions" 
> at IETF 43, minutes at 
> http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/43/43rd-ietf-98dec-142.html#TopOfPage). This 
> was the applications-focused wishlist for transport from 1998, when COPS, 
> RADIUS, L2TP, HTTP-NG, SIP, NFSv4, SS7, IP Telephony and BGP4 were all trying 
> to figure out whether they needed to (continue to, in some cases) rely on TCP 
> for transport, or do "something else". I'm remembering that there were 
> slides, and I would love to have them to refer to, but *none* of the slide 
> decks made it into the proceedings. That was pre-Meeting Materials page, but 
> even my experience with the Meeting Materials page was that it's easier for 
> slide decks arriving late to go missing than for slide decks that arrived 
> early.
>
> As I reminded myself while starting to present v4 of the chair slides in 
> TSVAREA and realizing that what Martin was projecting was v1 (only a day 
> older), getting slidesets nailed down early limits the number of times when 
> you're surprised at what's being projected.
>
> I love consolidated slide decks. I bet anyone does, whose laptop 
> blue-screened while hooking up to a projector in the late 1990s. Nothing good 
> happens during transitions, whether switching laptops or switching 
> presentations :-)
>
> None of this should be taken as disagreement with proposals to experiment 
> with room shapes, whiteboards, , etc. that I heard last week.
>
> None of this should be taken as evidence of love for an unbroken stream of 
> presentations of drafts that aren't tied to issues discussed on mailing 
> lists, or as disagreement with the idea that presentations aren't always the 
> best way to communicate at the IETF.                                          
>                                    
>
> Thanks,
>
> Spencer, who also might disagree with some of this when he wakes up at a 
> normal hour ... and that hasn't happened yet ...
>
> (*) from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Procrustean, "producing or designed 
> to produce strict conformity by ruthless or arbitrary means".