On Jul 31, 2013, at 10:55 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
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.
When binding decisions are being made, this is of course the right thing to do. But we still need an accurate sense of the room (from active participants) just to make good use of meeting time - so (for example) we can know whether or not it appears that a problem has been discussed sufficiently and/or addressed. Of course we have to consult the mailing list in order to be sure we have rough consensus, but it's also very important to take advantage of face-to-face time to attempt to work out solutions to thorny problems. So the failure to get an accurate sense of the room might not necessarily mean that the wrong decision is made, it might mean that the decision doesn't get made until much later - maybe after there have been another one or two meetings. 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.
Sometimes, yes. But I doubt that should occupy the bulk of our meeting time. 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.
Some people don't see this, but I'm very convinced that the tools do have a significant effect on how we choose to convey our messages. Partly because of the hardware, partly because of the software, these tools are optimized for certain things and pessimized for others. It's pretty obvious that a laptop with a full-size keyboard and a poor pointing/drawing device is going to be much better at putting text on a screen than drawing diagrams. It's very easy to do what the tool makes it easy to do (typically put a few words of text on a screen) while losing sight of your purpose (typically to facilitate an interactive discussion with input from several parties). Part of the problem is indeed the tool's fault, or perhaps our fault for choosing the wrong tool for the job out of habit.
It's not that visual aids are inherently bad. Properly chosen visual aids can really help facilitate a discussion. But a few words in large type on a small screen is rarely effective, and these screens aren't big enough and the projectors often lack the resolution needed to display adequate diagrams. Also, the tools are generally designed to produce static content, rather than let you manipulate the content while it's on screen (say to illustrate the answer to a question).
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.
I'm not arguing that we need the same style of discussion that worked for IETF when it was ~300 people. You're right that we have a much larger and more diverse community now; we also have a much more diverse set of needs to consider in our designs. Because of all of this diversity, it's even more important that we let diverse voices be heard. We certainly need a better way to moderate discussions than either having the loudest people speak whenever they want, or forcing people to queue up at microphones. And yet, I think what we're doing now is actually far worse (even for our current circumstances) than what IETF was doing in 1990. We've taken huge steps in the wrong direction.
Keith
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