Hi Thomas, On 2/7/13 3:46 PM, Thomas Narten wrote: > It is good to document what we have been doing. But the text seems to > focus on technology and tools... > > IMO, what is missing is operational Best Practices. We seem to be > lacking them (are any written down?) And we don't follow them > consistently, especially from one WG to another. Many of the problems > I see with remote participation facilties have to do not with the > technology per se, but with lack of proper training and advance > testing. I get the general sense that getting the remote stuff to work > is a volunteer effort where each person tries it themselves with no > checklist of obvious things to do in advance, and no recourse if no > one in the room can get something working. > > E.g., I was at an interim meeting last fall, where it looked like when > the meeting started, that was the the first that folk actually looked > at the facilities in the room (phone, microphones, etc.) to see how > best to allow remote participants to speak. The quick conclusion was > "can't be done". This should have been worked out (and tested) in > advance, not at the start of the meeting. > I appreciate this point of view, but at what point do we mean that a face to face is really intended to be that? That is- if you can get the facilities going, great. If not, let's recall how many people are on the IETF payroll in this process, especially when it comes to interims. That having been said, I think it would be great to have a best practices guide or checklist as you suggest. Forgive me if this sounds, crass- it's not intended to be– but sending some text to kick things off would be very helpful. Eliot