wrote:
On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 11:47 AM, Dave Cridland
<dave@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Nice post.
I wonder whether a better mechanism for drawing newcomers into the inner circle - which is what I think you're intent is here - would be to randomly select people to be involved in a short online meeting to discuss the draft, rather than review
it in isolation.
It'd be a different kind of review, which adds value for us, I think, and would instantiate new human subnets which could be used to bootstrap other involvement.
I think that would be a useful additional approach (maybe have those randomly selected meet online before starting the reviews). I do want to be sensitive, though, to the language barriers to some extent. I used to recommend that folks interested in
participating in a working group start by being a scribe; I realized eventually how hard that was for some participants whose native language was not English. It's still useful for those for whom real-time capture of rapidly moving discussion is feasible,
but we need something that allows folks time to reflect as well.
I tried that a while back. I found that it's really hard for a newbie to scribe. First, you have people running to the mike, and no idea who they are. I tried to position myself just in front of the mike so I could see the name tags, but that worked less
than half of the times (there was another mike at the back). People saying their names helps very little, because it's very hard to catch even for English speakers. Add some different accent, and it becomes hopeless.
As chair, I try to pick the ones I know are familiar with those likely to come to the mike. Otherwise you end up with notes saying things like "someone at the mic says …"
Yoav
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