Better non-meeting progress, was Re: [73attendees] Attendance by country

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On the 73attendees list we had a discussion about making face-to-face meetings unnecessary through better technology.

In my opinion, that will be extremely hard to the point of being impossible, for various reasons. (See the 73attendees discussion for a bunch of them.) However, a more useful way forward would be to make remote participation work a whole lot better.

At one point we had multicast video for a couple of tracks, which didn't work very well. Now we have audo for all sessions, which works much better (although when the audio quality is bad it takes a lot of energy to listen and the lag makes reacting problematic). Jabber came along before we had audio everywhere, giving rise to the notion that someone should type in whatever happens in the meeting. I think that use of jabber is problematic, but using jabber as a back channel for additional discussion without interrupting the speaker only works on occasion because too few people participate in jabber, or participate in that way. And we don't use jabber anywhere in our process. I think there's an opportunity there once we figure out how to use it well.

But that's just the state of affairs today. Bandwidth and hardware are now cheap enough that we could revist video in the form of unicast streaming, although that may take more person hours. Or maybe we can create some other way to allow remote participants to see the slides "live". I assume there are solutions for this, although they may not be compatible with the quaint operating systems some participants choose to use. Maybe we can hack something together ourselves? Export slides to images or HTML, use some web magic to have the current one on a web page, a volunteer triggers advancing the slides?

Something that I'd like to see is a way for remote participants to talk back. I know a system that can do this called Talk Shoe exists that allows people to make home brew call in radio shows. If it works well enough, we could even do away with microphones in the meetings and people can just speak into their laptops.

However, making progress here probably requires more than just volunteer work. Would it make sense to charge a fee for remote participation? At first, the extra money could be used to improve the tools for this. If it them becomes popular it could become a new revenue stream for the IETF.
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