On 02/11/2013 11:45 PM, Joel M. Halpern wrote:
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.
I remember IETF before PowerPoint.
Yes, people wrote topics or drew diagrams on transparencies that were
projected for viewing within the room. But (perhaps because preparing
such materials was laborious) I don't recall the majority of WG time
being devoted to reading things from those slides. I do recall lots of
fruitful discussions.
Keith
p.g. Admittedly, there were other differences when I first started
participating in IETF. e.g. Most people didn't have laptops, and the
rooms didn't have wireless Internet, so you didn't see meeting rooms
full of people playing solitare, reading email, and/or browsing the web
and not paying attention.