Inline
On Thu, Oct 13, 2022 at 04:58:58PM -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
> 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.
>
I do not accept positions that give up on getting the best possible audio
quality for conferencing. In fact, i think ew alreay see good examples where
conferences can be better than in-person meetings wrt. audio:
- Webex has transcription. That can be better/easier to read by non-native speakers
than listening to fast speakers. If/when speech recognition gets even better,
it might also help to understand bad, non-native speakers through transcription
- meetecho and others (webex etc) have speaker metadata, so i know much more easily
who is speaking than our standard in-room experience.
- In room experiences can be worse than my own personal @home setup wrt audio
and video quality.
Of course, email has a lot of benefit, such s being avble to get up for 30 minutes,
have a copy and refine your argument before finalizing it, but of course it has a lot
of downsides, so its too broad a problem to come up with easy comparisons.
I fully agree on the stress factor of conferences and live meetings, i think it is
worse for non-native and less experienced participants given the real-time requirements.
> >
> > 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.
> 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.
+1 Key word here is "active" i think. Stable if not growing observer participation.
> 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.
Don't think in-person is the main issue.
Long time to produce RFC is IMHO big reason
Funding for topics relating to what can be done in IETF is also core reason
Aka: it is uncommon, but stsill well possible IMHO to participate as an
acedemic through email/conference-calls and produce RFC. You just need funding
and some IETF WG/team that works fast enough for an acaemics requirements.
> 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.
Mostly constrained to discussion forums like ietf ML, not if you're working in a WG,
so luckily mostly irrelevant to work output IMHO.
Cheers
Toerless
> 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
>
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