if we could get rid of wireless and powerpoint, we'd be much better off.
Personal opinion: disagree. Wireless is immensely useful to grab a document, check something on another SDO's web site, and - yes - for instant messaging (e.g. "we need you in here right now"). And some people simply have to multitask in order to be able to attend IETF meetings in the first place. The jabber scribing has become very important for remote participants - this time we even had one Area Director who was partcipating actively by jabber (and audio streaming). The wireless glitches that interrupted jabber were a real problem this time.
yes, yes, and yes. but in many meetings it's hard to escape the impression that most of the people in the room aren't really paying more than say 10% of their attention to the meeting.
As for presentations, the fact that they vary in quality can't be blamed on PPT. It should be blamed on the presenters, perhaps.
not on PPT as opposed to any of the other similar tools that exist for that purpose. but there's something about that medium that seems to encourage poor presentations - slides consisting of a small amount of text (because of the low resolution of the medium) rather than drawings (because it's easier to type in text on a keyboard than it is to draw drawings with a mouse or trackpad). even with the old-style transparencies you could get more readable information on a page, and you could draw on them in real time.
and yet even this is beside the point. maybe this is age setting in, but it seems to me we used to get a lot more work done when we used our meetings primarily for discussion rather than scheduling presentations for most or all of the meeting time. these days some IETF WG meetings remind me of Apple's 1984 commercial...except that there's nobody to throw a hammer through the screen.
one benefit of our somewhat reduced attendance should be that we can get more work done by reverting to a more effective meeting style. (or maybe our reduced attendance can be attributed to a widespread realization that we're not getting much work done in these meetings?)
Keith
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