On 11/12/12 8:32 AM, Riccardo Bernardini wrote: > Let me add my own experience here, related to a different > environment (scientific conferences), but also very similar to yours. > Usually, if I go to a conference it is because I have a paper to > present, but that it is not the only payback of being there. There > is the hall (or bar) talking with old colleagues of mine, there is > the casual meeting of other researchers (old and young) working in my > field with which I exchange experiences, point of view and maybe a > new collaboration can be born. Actually, I do not know how this > could be replicated with an online tool. Well, I think it's important to be clear that IETF meetings are working meetings and they exist largely to progress documents, so the goals are somewhat different. I think that at this point I've done the remote participation thing as much as anybody and from my perspective the main problem is not the tools but that the quality of the experience varies enormously with the attention/skill of the session chairs. Some are attentive to remote participants, some don't even bother to acknowledge we exist. There's a WG chairs wiki page on facilitating remote participation at http://wiki.tools.ietf.org/group/wgchairs/wiki/RemoteParticipation. I've also had very good experiences using email to make the kind of contacts you've mentioned - something comes up in a session and sending out-of-band email directly to the person who said something interesting. In-person participation brings with it benefits that remote participation doesn't (and is mandatory for people in certain roles). But the cost-benefit tradeoff? I'm not sure, frankly. Melinda