On Aug 16, 2013, at 6:39 PM, John C Klensin <john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com>
wrote:
IIR, we've tried audio input. It works really well for
conference-sized meetings (e.g., a dozen or two dozen people
around a table) with a few remote participants. It works really
well for a larger group (50 or 100 or more) and one or two
remote participants. I've even co-chaired IETF WG meetings
remotely that way (with a lot of help and sympathy from the
other co-chair or someone else taking an in-room leadership
role).
But, try it for several remote participants and a large room
full of people, allow for audio delays in both directions, and
about the last thing one needs is a bunch of disembodied voices
coming out of the in-room audio system at times that are not
really coordinated with what is going on in the room. Now it
can all certainly be made to work: it takes a bit of
coordination on a chat (or equivalent) channel, requests to get
in or out of the queue that are monitored from within the room,
and someone managing those queues along with the mic lines.
Yup, it definitely takes those things. Been there, done that, got the IETF
t-shirt. :)
I think we might be able to do it, using the jabber scribes for those
"coordination" actions. Maybe. It depends on the number of remote active
participants and quality of scribes. The jabber scribes would have to act like
the operator-assisting person in big conferences with remote participants. (the
old "we've got a question from Jane Doe, go ahead Jane" type thing)
For the WGs I go to (RAI area mostly), we have good scribes and not a large
number of remote people who actually participate (as opposed to monitor).
We've had some exceptions, but my impression is the things the remote people
wanted to say in those cases were usually said by someone locally anyway so
they're more of a +1 thing. I.e., if there are lots of local attendees, you
usually get someone saying what you were going to say anyway. Not that someone
remote shouldn't say it as well, because it does matter if you hear the same
thing being repeated. But at least it's not so much "interaction" needed for
hearing that.
But yes if there are a dozen remote active participants, and a 100 people
locally in the room, it's chaos. It's not chaos because the remote
participants don't get mic time - it's chaos because they *do* get mic time.
The delay in letting them know it's their turn at the mic, delay in real-time
interaction, the mental switch to "remote mode" for local participants, etc.,
all cause the meeting to slow down... a lot.
It's like multiple processes running on one CPU - context switching is painful.
We can try to pile up the remote participants to go all at once, so that
there're fewer context switches. That's what folks do in big conferences: the
remote participants are queued up until the local ones have finished, and then
the remote ones go all at once. Unfortunately that turns it into a Q&A type
thing at the end, and not a discussion, but with that big an active audience
that's probably all it could be anyway.
But, by that point, many of the disadvantage of audio input
relative to someone reading from Jabber have disappeared and the
other potential problems with audio input -- noise, level
setting, people who are hard to understand even if they are in
the room, and so on-- start to dominate.
Yes, audio quality and volume control and a bunch of related things are very
important for this to work. IANAE on that - there are professionals who do
that stuff for a living.
Would I prefer audio
input to typing into Jabber under the right conditions? Sure,
in part because, while I type faster than average it still isn't
fast enough to compensate for the various delays. But it really
isn't a panacea for any of the significant problems.
OK, so what are the significant problems? What have the WGs you've been
participating in not been doing, that makes you feel like you don't get to
participate remotely?
-hadriel