Re: making our meetings more worth the time/expense

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On 7/31/2013 4:23 AM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
While that is true, I think it misses the point of the objections to
the sit-and-watch-PowerPointTV.

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.


I'm a fan of powerpoint, but with careful discipline in its use.

"The drafts" are the bible for detail, of course. They must be the ultimate arbiter of current truth. But while consulting the drafts for very specific concerns is often essential, using them during a discussion often is distracting. Forest-vs-tree distinctions come to mind.

I see properly done slides as serving two important purposes:

   1. Concise summary of issues

   2. Helpful synchronization for those not fully up to speed and
      especially those not native English speakers

The first requires the presenter to distill things beforehand and in their head, and that's always useful discipline for a discussion and even more so for a debate. The exercise of producing the distillation serves to ensure that the speaker, at least, has a concise sense of the issues.

The latter is just good group management, especially for a group trying to be... inclusive.

The challenge is how to balance detail with summary -- verbosity with terseness -- in the slides. And how to use the slides.

I used to do slides that were very cryptic. Just keywords. As I had to do presentations with non-native speakers, I was taught to make the slides stand alone so that they were useful even without anyone speaking to them. "Telegraphic" language is roughly where that landed. More than just keywords but much, much less than full narrative.

As for how to use the slides, I try not to read them, but instead to speak in a way that covers what the slides cover, albeit in full sentences. So there should be correlation, but not verbatim recitation. (I said "try".)




On 7/31/2013 7:22 AM, Scott Brim wrote:
> http://tools.ietf.org/wg/intarea/trac/wiki/MeetingTimePrioritization

I might argue that that specific list is overly fussy and possibly Procrustean, but the gist of it definitely looks like the right kind of thinking, to focus wg face-time on resolving things rather than chatting and teaching.



d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net




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