Here's another post out of left field. It seems to me that in order to solve the problem of remote participation in meetings, we need to decide what it means to participate in a meeting. It seems to me that the important characteristic of a meeting is that one person speaks at a time. In WG meetings, one person presents and then others que up at a mic for comments/questions. The issues I've seen only relate to the comment/question part. One group of comments deals with the difficulty of the current jabber setup to allow comments/questions to become the focus, the "one person speaking". Perhaps this could be worked out with some kind of enforced protocol, such that mic speakers' questions/comments are interleaved with jabber questions/comments in some way. I think, though, it would be harder to follow threads of thought in this way, especially if there are many jabber questions/comments that come in on a specific topic while mic speakers start to follow a different issue. Some kind of policing where issues are discussed sequentially might help, but might be too restricting. Maybe it would be better to take thread discussions off the mic at some point and use some kind of forum software? A second problem is the use of jabber to discuss offline what speakers are discussing. It seems to me that this is a direct contradiction to what is supposed to occur in a meeting, where one person speaks at a time. I've never used Webex, so I can't comment on its applicability. It seems to me that jabber is not the right tool for remote meeting participation. It probably works fine for meeting monitoring along with the audio, but seems to fall short for remote meeting participation without some kind of enforced meeting protocol. Is what Melinda described enough? Should there be some kind of media Sargent-At-Arms enforcing Robert's 21st Century Rules? Jabber seems to be important for the scribe task. That's not something to be taken lightly. In fact, the whole issue of what the meeting record should be is taken too lightly, in my opinion. Should it be the audio with scribe comments, plus the Jabber record? If that's the case, a person looking up the meeting would need the audio and the scribe/jabber comments. Should it be the scribe notes, which can be undependable, even with the jabber comments? Should we be looking at voice-to-text more seriously? Seems to me that this is a universal problem that someone should have solved. If not, it's a great opportunity. -----Original Message----- From: ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx [mailto:ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Thomas Nadeau Sent: Monday, October 24, 2011 7:49 AM To: SM Cc: ietf@xxxxxxxx Subject: Re: Requirement to go to meetings > At 05:52 24-10-2011, Marshall Eubanks wrote: >> As jabber scribe, I view part of my responsibility as relaying questions asked on jabber (if no one else is doing so). For groups that have secretaries, I suggest that that be part of the secretary's responsibilities. > > The secretary is busy taking minutes. That doesn't mean that the secretary cannot draw attention if someone is asking a question on Jabber. The audio recording is a handy supplement when the speaker cannot be identified or to cross-check the details. In my experience that unfortunately happens about %10 of the time. We need some way for remote participants to virtually stand in the mic queue so they get called upon and allowed to not only ask a question, but to follow-up - especially if the presenter needs clarification on the question. > As for remote participation, if you do not know anyone in the room you are going to be ignored. That's an IETF feature that also applies for people who attend meetings. There are little things that can help remote participants follow what is going on. Melinda Shore mentioned some of them. Most of the fixes are non-technical. Jabber/etc... are really bubblegum and bailing wire solutions. I have been forced to skip meetings in the past due to budget issues, and can tell you that relying on others to proxy for you just doesn't work. Despite knowing someone in the room, you are assuming they are not busy trying to work themselves either participating in the meeting, writing documents, or whatever. I've tried Skyping into meetings, jabber, whatever and it just doesn't work well because the people that ultimately must speak for you often can't. Also, you assume people know someone well enough to ask for them; which is asking a lot especially for new people. The best approach I've witnessed (and used many times) is WebEx where you can explicitly request to ask a question by virtually raising your hand, and then when the chair recognizes you, you can ask your own question. You can then interact with the presenter - and if the chairs are being sophisticated, they could project your face on a screen. You can also use this mechanism as a means when gauging consensus where the chair(s) ask for a feeling of the room and for people to raise their hands. --Tom > > If you do not go to meetings, it's unlikely that you will be able to follow the BoF you are interested in. There may be times when decisions are taken during a meeting. It is not worth the nit-picking if the outcome won't change. > > Regards, > -sm > _______________________________________________ > Ietf mailing list > Ietf@xxxxxxxx > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf > _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf