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Re: about remote attendance and hallway discussions

2015-02-13 13:11:21
On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 11:52 AM, Michael Richardson 
<mcr+ietf(_at_)sandelman(_dot_)ca>
wrote:


Mary Barnes <mary(_dot_)h(_dot_)barnes(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
    > or two of the face to face meetings for the WG.  I would posit that
    > these meetings can be equally as effective as face to face meetings
in
    > making progress. Once we started those meetings, we didn't find that
we
    > needed f2f interim meetings.  There of course, the timezone issue
with
    > these sorts of meetings, but that can be managed.  But, we do have
all
    > the tools to make work between meetings more effective and more open
to
    > remote participants that I don't think we're taking advantage of.

For the remote participant, the most important thing that the physical
meeting does it to establish a time zone, and force everyone else to
conform
to that.  Additionally, by removing people from their office, it removes a
whole host of "distractions": bosses, spouses, kids, commutes,...

One of the things that I think we could try is to have a meeting with
dozens
to hundreds of locations.


It would still be 5 days long.
It would have a primary location in order to establish a time zone for it.
It would have a schedule, and agenda and conflict resolution.
It's just that I would go stay in a nearby hotel and/or conference center,
and I'd have to have lunch or do social events with nearby people.

[MB] Right. That's a choice you make because you feel it's important to
optimize
your participation.  I'm making the same choice for the Dallas meeting, but
I don't think
that sort of thing is a general factor for planning a meeting (i.e., how
many people have to
stay at a hotel even with this model).  [/MB]

It would an experiment.


 [MB]  Personally, I don't think the logistics of arranging this are at all
worth the efforts.
That all said, maybe we could setup a wiki for remote participants that are
willing to make
local arrangements for the meetings for folks in the area to get together
for various sessions.
Although, with our remote participation tools, I don't see a huge advantage
other than of
course enabling informal discussions.
[/MB]

The hardest thing for me, when attending remotely, is convincing my kid (who
wakes up at 5am regularly), is that I'm "at work" at that time, and that
when it's time for me to sleep (in remote time zone), that I really do need
to sleep.

[MB] That's well understood. But, again not something that applies to all
remote
participants.  Also, you need to consider the fact that at every meeting we
have the
majority of the attendees not in their own timezone - just look around the
meeting rooms
and see the folks that are falling asleep or sleeping in various chairs and
couches around
the meeting venue.   Just because we're all physically in the same timezone
doesn't mean
we all physiologically in the same time zone.

I think we need to focus on the things we can change.  We can't totally
eliminate the timezone
issue (even for face to face meetings) and we certainly can't make
adjustments that address everyone's
personal life challenges.  We all have to balance those - even when we are
at f2f meetings, we
usually create another set of personal life challenges.
[/MB]



--
Michael Richardson <mcr+IETF(_at_)sandelman(_dot_)ca>, Sandelman Software 
Works
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