Re: procedural question with remote participation

On 08/06/2013 11:06 AM, Andrew Feren wrote:
> On 08/06/2013 09:08 AM, Keith Moore wrote:
> > On 08/04/2013 02:54 PM, Ted Lemon wrote:
> > > While I think getting slides in on time is great for a lot of 
> > > reasons, reading the slides early isn't that important.   What is 
> > > important is that remote people see the slides at the same time as 
> > > local people.   For that, it seems to me that Meetecho support does 
> > > exactly what is needed.   You just follow the slideshow online, 
> > > along with the audio.
> > I agree that remote people should see the slides at the same time as 
> > local people, except that I think that in both cases this should be 
> > well before the meeting.  The slides shouldn't be shown at the 
> > meeting unless needed to illustrate a point of active discussion.
> > People keep acting as if the purpose of these meetings - the reason 
> > people spend thousands of euro and travel thousands of km - is to 
> > watch slides.
> Hi Keith,
>
> I think this sort of misses the point.  At least for me as a remote 
> participant.
Actually I think the desire to get slides out early largely misses the 
point.   Or at least, it's an effort optimizing what should be the rare 
case.
I fully agree that slides should be easily available to both local and 
remote participants well prior to any meeting in which a presentation 
will be made.  (Say a plenary session where presentations are normal and 
appropriate.)   While speakers might like to revise their slides at the 
last minute, there's no reason why they shouldn't be expected to upload 
preliminary slides well in advance (because the key to an effective 
presentation is good preparation, after all) and a revised version (if 
necessary) later. This isn't at all rocket science, and there's no 
reason why it should not be done.
But if we really want to make remote participation effective, we need to 
figure out better ways to involve remote participants in _discussions_ - 
not only in plenaries, WG meetings, BOFs, etc., but also in hallway and 
bar conversations.   Having a local speaker read something from a laptop 
that was typed into a Jabber session by a remote participant is better 
than nothing.   But surely we can do better.
> As of today when the slides are available (or if there are no slides 
> and just talk) I can follow WG meetings quite well.  Being able to 
> actively engage in any discussion remotely is, IMO, pretty much 
> limited to the mailing lists.  Getting involved in an active 
> discussion at a WG meeting remotely is currently difficult at best and 
> impossible at worst.
It used to be the case that Internet access at IETF meetings was flaky, 
either because of the wireless network or because of the network 
connection or both.   More recently the performance of the meeting 
Internet access has been stellar.   If we put the same kind of effort 
into facilitating remote participation in discussions, I suspect we 
could move from "difficult at best and impossible at worse" to "works 
well".  Of course, it might take awhile, but it's those very kinds of 
discussions that are so essential to broad consensus that (when it 
works) makes our standards effective.   The fact that it doesn't work 
well now is not a good argument for not making it work well in the future.
(We're supposed to be creating the future, after all.  That's our job.)

It's also the case that the fact that facilities for involving remote 
participants in conversation haven't historically worked well, is used 
as a justification for continuing to have this dysfunctional style of 
conducting working group meetings, thus making very poor use of local 
participants' time and money.
I'm all for making presentation slides available to local and remote 
participants well before the meeting.   But if we're only concerned with 
making presentation slides available, we're selling ourselves very 
short.  That's the point I'm trying to make.
Keith