Keith, you seem to be asking for something (discussion, wit no
presentation), that has never happened in the WGs I have attended in the
last 20 years. Even the WG sessions that had the best, most useful,
discussions, generally started with a presentation of the topic and issue.
Such initial presentation is usually strongly helped by clear bullets
that everyone can follow to keep straight what is being discussed.
yes, many of the briefings (here and elsewhere) are people reading their
slides. yes, Powerpoint seems to make this worse in the way the tool is
designed. But the issues seems to me not to e slides.
If I had to guess, it is a combination of folks lacking confidence to
discuss their material, folks doing what they have seen, and the
patterns the tools encourage. There almost certainly are other factors.
If you could assume that all 10 people you were talking to were fully up
to speed on the topic, and had not lost context to the other 10 WG
sessions they have been preparing for, and if we knew how to hold
conversations effectively in rooms with 50+ people, and ...
Yes, we should be looking for encouraging, and thanking / rewarding,
those people who use their slots to briefly present and then engage in
conversation with the WG.
But lets not invent a fictional past in which this was some how natural,
or even the norm.
Yours,
Joel
On 2/11/2013 11:34 PM, Keith Moore wrote:
On 02/11/2013 10:46 PM, Bob Hinden wrote:
Keith,
On Feb 11, 2013, at 5:17 PM, Keith Moore wrote:
On 02/05/2013 11:04 AM, IETF Chair wrote:
3.4. Slide Sharing
Slides are often sent by email in advance of the meeting.
WebEx allows the slides and desktop applications to be
viewed by the
remote participants. These are controlled by the presenter. The
presenter can be shifted from participant to participant as needed.
Can we *please* discourage the habit of treating IETF WG meetings as
one series of PowerPoint presentations after another? This makes
the meetings much less productive.
The notion that there are supposed to be slides for each
presentation, is IMO, a huge error.
I disagree. The slides are a great help for non-native english speakers.
Let me back up a bit, because I don't think I stated my case strongly
enough.
WG meetings should not, in general, be used for presentations. They
should primarily be used for discussions. Presentations are largely a
waste of precious WG time.
It is sometimes possible to prepare slides to help facilitate
discussions. But more often than not, the exercise of preparing slides
encourages the speaker to fill up most or all of the available time with
presentation material, leaving insufficient time for discussion of
important questions.
I certainly agree that when presentations are made, the slides can be
helpful to those who aren't so fluent in English. My point is that
presentations should be made only rarely.
Keith