Re: presenting vs discussion in WG meetings (was re:Remote Participation Services)

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On 02/15/2013 12:46 PM, George, Wes wrote:
[WEG] Perhaps it would be helpful to make an informal recommendation to WG chairs (via the wiki, for example) that generally they should carve each request for agenda time roughly in half, with a hard limit of $speaker_time/2 devoted to "presenting" or otherwise framing the discussion and the remaining time devoted to open mic discussion. Likely this will result in presenters asking for 2x their previous time, but at least it will be a more realistic method to plan out time during a meeting and reduce the instances where the WG will be running short of time for meaningful discussion if the presenter (or WG chair) isn't good at managing the available time and spends the whole allocation reading slides to the people in attendance.
I actually don't think a hard limit is a good idea. WGs need more presentation time in their early phases.

But this makes me realize that there's a related issue. An expectation that WG meetings are for presentations, leads to an expectation that there's lots of opportunity to present suggestions for new work to do. WG time scheduled for considering new work can actually take away time for discussion of ongoing work. And once the time is scheduled and people have made commitments to travel to meetings for the purpose of presenting new work, chairs are understandably reluctant to deny them their allotted presentation time.

(It seems like every time I attend an IETF there are numerous WG meetings with schedules full of presentations for new work that are hardly even listened to, and that those presentations crowd out discussion of ongoing work. When the alloted time for such discussion has elapsed, the chair will sigh and say "ok, let's take that to the mailing list".)

I suggest that ongoing work should nearly always take precedence over consideration of new work, particularly for new work that's not fairly close to the current scope of the WG's charter.

It follows that chairs probably shouldn't schedule all of their allotted meeting time by filling otherwise unused time with presentations of proposals for new work. The amount of time required for discussion is difficult to predict, and often runs over that anticipated. A better strategy might be this: List the major issues that need to be sorted out in face-to-face discussion, probably in order of importance (how much is this particular issue blocking WG progress on its chartered goals?) combined with some sense of how likely the group is to make progress. Allot maybe 5 minutes for each topic for presentation time (introduction of the discussion), to be followed by the actual discussion. Each discussion gets cut off after some pre-determined amount of time, or when the chair determines that it's unlikely to produce any useful progress.

If there's time left over after everything has been discussed, and the WG is close to finishing its chartered goals, the chair can invite speakers to briefly present proposals for new work. But in general a WG shouldn't preallocate time for such presentations in WG meetings - they should rather be discussed in separate BOF sessions.

Keith



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