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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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