Without singling out any particular comment, I think there are at least two things have have gotten lost in the discussions and suggestions. I assume that, in at least some cases, people didn't know. First, I don't know whether this should have been made explicit earlier or not, but this is not the first time the IETF has used Meetecho. Many of us have been using it for remote participation for years and a great deal of effort has gone into making it work smoothly for IETF's way of working [1]. I assume we are probably a little more critical than many of their customers but assume "our" changes have become, possibly with small variations, part of their main product offering. I believe their other customers have including many all remote, or all remote other than a very small number of people in a central location, setups, so the assumption in some messages that Meetecho has never been used before in an all-remote situation (or very close to it) is probably incorrect. I don't know if the latter is accurate but, if it is important, I think we should ask rather than jumping to conclusions. Second, many changes have occurred, at least to the user interfaces, between our use for remote participants at IETF 106 and this week. Personally, I like some of the changes but believe others show signs of having been done in haste and with too little thought and/or time for testing and review. I accept Jay's assertion that those changes were not micromanaged by the IETF leadership or staff, but note that Greg Wood indicated during and after one of the test sessions that at least some of those changes had been made at the behest of an IETF design committee and that that the I-D and discussions of the hum feature are quite explicit that the specifications came from the IESG. It is probably helpful to remember something else I learned a half-century ago about UI design. An experimental psychologist colleague I worked with them was fond of staying that, when people tried to evaluate a system, what they already knew was almost always better (obviously, just because they are used to it). For those who did not actively use Meetecho for remote participation during IETF 106 and earlier and who have spent a significant fraction of the last months on Zoom, WebEx, GoToMeeting, and their competitors, and who did not attend the test sessions, Meetecho probably feels very strange and is at a significant disadvantage. I recommend giving it a chance and doing so with an open mind. If, as appears to be the case from the timing of the announcements, all of this was done on relatively short notice. We should be impressed that it works and identifying issues and making suggestions for improvements. If we want to make suggestions about replacing all of it with COTS software, we should consider how much effort has gone into trying to adapt Meetecho for IETF needs and remember that, before Meetecho came along, we tried to do remote participation with WebEx and, well, it didn't work out very well. best, john [1] In the interest of full disclosure, I participated in a few design sessions along with Alexa, Ray, and some Meetecho staff (and maybe others; I don't remember). I think I got sucked in because I started being intermittently involved in research in user interface and usability issues in distributed office teleconferencing systems in the early 1980s, studies that involved real experimental psychologists and controlled comparison of different approaches. And I may have been compensated with some travel reimbursements or a registration fee waiver or two -- not significant enough that I remember.
