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On 8/4/2013 3:10 PM, Hadriel Kaplan
wrote:
OK, I'll bite. Why do you and Michael believe you need to have the slides 1 week in advance? You have the agenda and drafts 2 weeks in advance. The slides aren't normative. Even when they're not about a draft in particular, the slides are not self-standing documents. They're merely to help with discussion. Not getting the slides at all is a different matter - but 7 days in advance is counter-productive. They should be as up-to-date as practical, to take into account mailing list discussions. [or at least that's how I justify my same-day, ultra-fresh slides] If you need to have them on the website 7 days in advance, you really need to get a faster Internet connection. ;) I'm a TSV AD, but I'm sending this note wearing no hat (someone last week asked me why I wasn't wearing a cowboy hat if I was from Texas - no, not even a cowboy hat). I read through the discussion on this, and I'm only responding to Hadriel because his post was the last one I saw before replying. Thank you all for sharing your thoughts. YMMV ("Your Mileage May Vary"), but I have been sponsored for several years by a company that sends a sizable number of folks to IETF who are not native English speakers. Having slides early helps non-native English speakers (I believe I've heard that some slide decks are translated into other languages, although I wouldn't know, because I read the slides in English). After his first IETF (Paris/63), Fuyou Maio said to me, "understanding spoken English is the short board in the water barrel" (the idea being that your effectiveness at the IETF is limited by your ability to quickly parse spoken English). The folks I talk to get plenty of chances to translate spoken English during Q&A, and don't need additional practice translating the presentations in real time. Yes, I know people say things that aren't on their slides, but if what's on their slides doesn't help other people understand what they are saying, they probably shouldn't be using those slides. In the mid-2000s, I remember an admonition for chairs to write out the questions the chairs are taking a hum on, to accommodate non-native English speakers (and to write out all the questions before taking the first hum, to accommodate anyone who agrees with the second choice but prefer the fourth choice when they hear it after humming). I'm having a hard time making the "a week early or you don't present" case for slide cutoffs, because we DO talk during the meeting week - and in groups RTCWeb, with a Thursday slot and a Friday slot, we had time to talk a lot. If the cutoff was for presentations of new individual drafts, that's a different question, so there might be some way to make non-Procrustean improvements(*). I agree with the "chairs looking at slides for sanity" point. I'm remembering more than one working group where we chairs got presentations that included about a slide per minute for the time allocated to the topic - noticing that even one day before saved us from the ever-popular "we can't talk about this presentation because we don't have time" moment. During IETF 87, I had reason to consult the proceedings for the non-workgroup-forming RUTS BOF ("Requirements for Unicast Transport/Sessions" at IETF 43, minutes at http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/43/43rd-ietf-98dec-142.html#TopOfPage). This was the applications-focused wishlist for transport from 1998, when COPS, RADIUS, L2TP, HTTP-NG, SIP, NFSv4, SS7, IP Telephony and BGP4 were all trying to figure out whether they needed to (continue to, in some cases) rely on TCP for transport, or do "something else". I'm remembering that there were slides, and I would love to have them to refer to, but *none* of the slide decks made it into the proceedings. That was pre-Meeting Materials page, but even my experience with the Meeting Materials page was that it's easier for slide decks arriving late to go missing than for slide decks that arrived early. As I reminded myself while starting to present v4 of the chair slides in TSVAREA and realizing that what Martin was projecting was v1 (only a day older), getting slidesets nailed down early limits the number of times when you're surprised at what's being projected. I love consolidated slide decks. I bet anyone does, whose laptop blue-screened while hooking up to a projector in the late 1990s. Nothing good happens during transitions, whether switching laptops or switching presentations :-) None of this should be taken as disagreement with proposals to experiment with room shapes, whiteboards, , etc. that I heard last week. None of this should be taken as evidence of love for an unbroken stream of presentations of drafts that aren't tied to issues discussed on mailing lists, or as disagreement with the idea that presentations aren't always the best way to communicate at the IETF. Thanks, Spencer, who also might disagree with some of this when he wakes up at a normal hour ... and that hasn't happened yet ... (*) from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Procrustean, "producing or designed to produce strict conformity by ruthless or arbitrary means". |