At 19:00 08-02-2008, Lawrence Rosen wrote: >It seems to me that the $800k budget for a single conference can buy an >awful lot of telephony (or VoIP) bandwidth so that inefficient and expensive >in-person meetings can be replaced by web meetings. Perhaps that money could >even be used to pay programmers to create a workable web-based voice and >video system for technical meetings -- open source, of course. In-person meetings do not have the same dynamics as web meetings. People would react differently if they were interacting through a voice and video system. The aim of a meeting is usually to have all the people in one place away from the "distractions" of their regular work. >Surely we can find a way to work together without always having to fly to >distant climes? And we'd save the environment too, if technical >professionals got together electronically. When technical professionals get together electronically, they have flame wars. :-) Regards, -sm _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx http://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf