On 10/13/22 16:33, Abdussalam Baryun wrote:
On Wed, Aug 24, 2022 at 11:20 AM Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 8/23/22 19:32, Jess Porter wrote:
> just going to try to condense this for clarity:
>
> it doesn't look like they disagreed with what Masataka said, just how they
> said it
IMO, constructive disagreement would have been far better than calling
out someone (as a warning to others?) for violating a hopelessly vague
rule about "uncivil" speech.
May be not speech but input participation. There is big difference in 1) input by voice only, or 2) input by voice with video or 3) input by words only on list.Also there are differences of such participations, while only one input is received publicly by registered ietf-community.
For what it's worth, I personally find conference calls (with or without video) to be MUCH more stressful than email, and at least for me the potential for frustration and mis-interpretation seems greater with audio than without. (I'm not claiming that everyone else has or should have the same experience.) It's absolutely helpful to have tone of voice, facial expressions, and maybe even body language as input. But to me it seems like people tend to express themselves more precisely and carefully when typing, than they tend to do when speaking in real time. There are also common problems with remote conferencing: poor audio quality, poor microphone quality, background noise; and artifacts from packet loss, jitter compensation, and poor CODECs causing what sounds like vocal stress). I don't generally experience the same problems with in-person meetings that I do with remote audio/video meetings.
As far as I can tell, active participation in IETF was substantially smaller in the last few pre-COVID years than it was in the late 1990s. But I'm judging more from face to face meeting attendance figures than anything else.
I miss the days when IETF was often capable of having constructive
technical discussions, even when some participants' frustration was
evident, without the need for moderators or Tone Police.
That was in the past because it was a smaller community, but if we plan to expand we should change for best practices.
I suspect one difference between "those days" and today is that
IETF in the past had proportionally more representation from
academics and less from employees of corporations, than we have
today. IETF has effectively filtered out a lot of non-corporate
people (whether deliberately or accidentally) with its high cost
of in-person participation.
Another possible difference is that there is greater stress in
societies today, more political polarization and conflict, more
support for rigid authoritarianism, and this external stress is
leaking into IETF.
The two explanations (there are probably others also) are not
mutually exclusive.
As best as I
can recall, some people were really good at responding constructively to
less-than-perfect input, and this practice had the effect of making the
community more inclusive rather than less. That's a skill we (as a
community) would do well to cultivate.
I don't think it was about skill, I think those people were usually meeting face-to-face within WG once or twice a year (knowing each other), and then they discuss on the list each week, now days most of the people discuss on the lists and never have met each other so it is not the same,
Meeting in person definitely helped make it easier to understand others when communicating by email.
Keith
