On Jul 30, 2013, at 3:53 PM, Jari Arkko wrote:
This is something that I've struggled with for years. A big part of the "problem" (from one point-of-view) is that we've become so geographically diverse in our choice of meeting sites that we've drastically raised the cost of attending meetings on a regular basis - everyone has to travel a lot to so (though people in North America still have an easier time of it). And while there are clearly things that could be done to reduce meeting costs, we'd be doing very well to reduce total trip cost by more than say 15%. But earlier today I realized that the problem isn't just the cost of attending meetings - it's the value that we get in return for those meetings. I've been taking notes about how ineffectively we use our meeting time. Most of what I've observed won't surprise anybody, but here's a summary: WG meeting sessions aren't scheduled to encourage discussion, but to discourage it. At meeting after meeting, in several different areas, I see the lion's share of the time devoted to presentations rather than discussion. Similarly, WG meetings generally aren't run in such a way to facilitate discussion, but to discourage it. It's only Tuesday afternoon and I've already lost count of how many times I've heard a meeting chair tell people that they have to stop discussing things because there are more presentations to do. Rooms are set up not to facilitate discussion, but to discourage it. The lights are dim, the chairs are facing forward rather than other participants, the projector screen (not the person facilitating a discussion, even if someone is trying to facilitate a discussion) is the center of attention. The chairs are set so close together and with so few aisles that it's hard for most of the attendees to get to the mics. The "microphone discipline" which was intended to facilitate remote participation ends up making discussion more difficult for everybody who has paid to be on site. In the vast majority of WG sessions, everyone has his nose in a laptop. (me included). This is because the information being presented at the moment is generally not valuable enough to occupy the attendees' attention. The attendees are there for one of two reasons - either they're just trying to absorb some low-value information while still doing something else that is more useful, or they're waiting for some opportunity to actually interact - either within the context of that WG meeting or afterward (perhaps because the best way to catch a particular person is often to show up at a WG meeting that that person is attending.) All of these things have been standard practice, in IETF and elsewhere, for so long, that hardly anyone questions them. They have to be that way because they're habit, and even if one or two people try to change things (and I realize some ADs are trying), they have to contend with the mindless habit-driven decisions of everyone else involved. Well, please excuse my candor, but f*ck habit. We can't be effective engineers if we let bad habits continue to dictate how we work. ------ My expenses for this meeting are around USD 2.500. Some are paying more, some less, but if we multiply average expense times the number of people attending, that's a tremendous amount of money. Add that value is dwarfed by the value of the people's time that is being spent here. We are spending this time to travel to meet face-to-face, not so that we can see PowerPoint all day for a week, but so we can interact. Presentations, for the most part, do not help. They get in the way. Visual aids can help to facilitate a discussion, but they should be as brief as possible, and the room setup, meeting schedule, etc. should not be optimized for the visual aids. They should be optimized for discussion. For 80% of most WG meetings, the lights should be bright, the participants should face each other. If there's a person facilitating the discussion that person should be the center of attention. If we're going to use microphones, the rooms should be set up to allow everyone in the room to have easy access to them. We should have several microphones, again facing each other, so that several people can have a conversation without everyone having to queue up. And maybe, in addition, we need to provide better places for people to hang out and work while trying to get an opportunity to interact with specific people. The terminal rooms are generally placed in out-of-the-way corners, but the most effective places to interact with people are in the hallways. Keith |