On Jul 30, 2013, at 10:38 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > It's been pointed out before that in a group with very diverse languages, > written words are usually better understood than speech. It's a fact of life > that you can't have a full-speed cut-and-thrust discussion in a group > of 100 people, half of whom are speaking a foreign language. Sitting in > a circle does not fix this. Yes, but most of the people in a typical WG meeting today aren't really participating in the meeting anyway. They're not contributing input, they're not paying attention. Their noses are in laptops. It's hard to tell how many of them would be participating if the meeting were more useful, but the very fact that the room contains so many nonparticipants is itself a deterrent to getting work done in the meeting. If nothing else, whenever someone tries to get a sense of the room, it's very misleading - people may be humming when they haven't even been listening, or it may appear that there's no significant support for something when there really is significant support among those who are interested in the topic. > Also, remote participants need full text slides; the soundtrack simply > isn't enough. You seem to be assuming that the purpose of WG meetings is to have presentations. I emphatically disagree. If we decide to make WG meetings fora for interaction and discussion, we can adopt or invent disciplines and tools to better accommodate interaction and discussion between people of diverse languages and including those at other locations. But the disciplines and tools that we've adopted at the moment are designed to accommodate an audience, not active participants. > The old days are gone. It sounds like you are saying that IETF is doomed to become irrelevant because it's stuck in habits that do not work. I hope you're wrong about that. Keith