On Feb 26, 2015, at 9:37 AM, John C Klensin <john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com>
wrote:
The more we shift
from doing almost all of our work on mailing lists to doing a
significant proportion of it in high-frequency interim meetings,
the more we tend to narrow effective participation to
vendor-supported people with dedicated time in convenient (for
the WG majority) time zones and reduce some of the diversity we
have claimed is important.
Actually, my experience is the opposite: mailing lists are incredibly time
consuming, because there are a few participants who feel the need to repeat
themselves over and over again in any given discussion, and people aren't
concise in their responses, nor considerate of the burden their responses will
impose on readers, so there is a lot of reading, much of which is completely
redundant. Being restricted to the low shared bandwidth of voice in an online
meeting substantially mitigates that, if the working group chair is doing a
good job of disciplining the discussion.
There is a reason why we do f2f meetings, and it's not because we like the
cookies (although we do).