Hi Keith, On 31/07/2013 18:35, Keith Moore wrote: > 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. The last sentence there doesn't imply the previous one. I can only speak for myself (and I'm not in Berlin), but I am often looking at the slides, the draft and the jabber session while listening to the speaker; no need to look up in order to pay attention. Alternatively I am working on something else while waiting for the topic I'm interested in to start; or I'm checking whether it's time to move across to a clashing session. Of course I have no idea what fraction of attendees are doing this. > 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. That's true; I am much more suspicious of "sense of the room" consensus calls than I am of "sense of the mailing list" calls. But pretty much all WG Chairs do what they're supposed to by confirming the consensus on the list. >> 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. The purpose is to communicate, including communication with remote participants. Sometimes that means explaining things that are, perhaps, badly explained in the draft - and getting back comments that show what needs to be changed in the draft. > 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. I don't think it's fair to blame the tools. We should be asking questions about how we use the tools. >> 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. No, I mean that we have to deal with a very diverse community and the style of discussion that was successful when you or I first started coming to the IETF isn't going to come back. I don't, unfortunately, have the magic formula. On 31/07/2013 14:23, Andrew Sullivan wrote: > First, I observe that we already _have_ a great deal of written words: > the drafts. I continue to believe that altogether too much time in WG > meetings is spent "introducing", "presenting", or otherwise showing > off ideas in an existing draft to participants in the WG. I > acknowledge that (particularly in early stages of WG life, in topics > with a lot of different work, and in cross-WG presentations) these > "intro" presentations are a fact of life. But I think we are > extremely bad at holding the reigns on them. > > In a WG meeting, I think such "intro" presentations about drafts > really can be kept to three pieces of information: the name of the > draft, a slogan describing the problem it is supposed to solve, and a > pointer to the beginning(s) of discussion thread(s) on the draft. If > the person promoting the draft can't give the elevator pitch, they > don't know their own draft well enough to summarize it and shouldn't > be presenting it. That's a bit hard on people early in their IETF career who may be among the most creative. So I disagree, when we are talking about a piece of new work that has attracted interest on the mailing list - we should be reasonably liberal at that stage. Once. After that, I agree; repeat intros and non-substantive discussions shouldn't be given meeting time. But I've been in vey useful sessions where people have showed slides to illustrate open issues, and got very productive feedback that clarifies the options. I've been in other sessions where after a few seconds I switch off after 2 slides and wait for the chairs to call time. <deleted several paragraphs that I strongly agree with> ... > Unfortunately, actually running meetings this way is a lot of work, > requires fairly careful planning, and requires an indifference to > nasty remarks on the part of presenters who would much rather listen > to themselves for 20 minutes than to others. But I think it'd make > for better meetings. (Yes, along with room layouts that were more > suited to getting people to the mic.) I absolutely agree. >> > The old days are gone. > > Yes, and we need to figure out how to use meeting time effectively > here in the new days. That effective use does not, I think, involve > expanding to fill all the time in the year with 20 minute low-content > presentations summarizing the draft that you can read in the span of > the time it takes to get through the presentation. (Perhaps I'm > wrong. Perhaps people find that the only time they have now to read > the drafts is during the presentation of the draft. I sure hope not.) I agree here too. It really all depends on strong session control by the chairs and a much stronger "this is not a conference" message to participants. Brian