On Thu, Feb 13, 2003 at 10:33:58PM -0800, Randy Bush wrote: > > i have used jabber in ietf meetings and similarcontexts. it works > to coordinate stuff in real-time. but that was not my application > this time. i really was after the as much content of the meeting > as possible. to do that well in jabber or whatever, one would have > to pay a court transcription person. whereas, as someone already > pointed out, a cheap video camera does the job. On the other hand, it's much faster and convenient to scan (and search) a text transcript compared to viewing a video feed. It also takes up less space to store. It's extremely amusing to think of a scribe as a compression algorithm, but that's basically what's going on. Unfortunately, as always, compression can sometimes be expensive. In some cases we might be able to get cheap grad students. Or perhaps we could find people who would be willing to transcribe 2 or 3 wg sessions that they aren't otherwise participating in exchange for a deep discount on their registration fee? There would need to be some quality control (maybe the wg chair has to certify afterwards that the transcript was an accurate record of the proceedings), but it would help make much better minutes. Of course, there are some downsides to having a non-participant scribe or take minutes for a meeting. Someone who is familiar with the background, context, and (unfortunately, sometimes) jargon of a working group can often take better minutes than an outsider. On the other hand, it is very hard to take good minutes and/or scribe while participating in the discussion, and often the minutes will suffer for those portions of the meeting where the minute-taker also wants to join into the discussion. (Or stand in line at the mike, etc.) That being said, though, I think that if the scribe was comprehensive enough, and the text was then immediately reviewed by the wg chairs and other core participants in the meeting, while the discusions was still fresh in their minds, the result might be a much *better* record of what happened than the current system of taking minutes for the meeting. - Ted
