Regarding the need for presentations early to get them translated, and the "non-Procrustean"[1] improvement of having cutoffs for presentations of new drafts: new drafts are still submitted 2 weeks in advance, and ISTM that a real non-Procrustean tactic would be to let the WG chairs do their jobs. If you've got a 40 page slide-deck chock full of text, giving a detailed tutorial on some mechanism, it's a different situation from the norm. (and I'd argue you're probably doing it wrong, but ymmv) But those appear to be the exceptions, not the rule; and WG chairs can handle push-back for exceptions if they need to. We don't have to create new draconian rules.
But for the general case, the truth is that Fuyou Maio is right - you really do need to be able to parse English quickly to truly participate effectively in an IETF physical meeting. And you need to be reasonably swift in either reading it, or following the speaker's words. It's not nice to say, but it's the truth. Real-time direct human communication is why we have the physical meetings to begin with, instead of only mailing lists and virtual meetings. (and for cross-wg-pollination, and for cookies)
The good news is the mailing lists and drafts themselves are in plain ascii which should make language translation software easier to use, and the physical meetings are voice/video/jabber recorded so you can get them translated afterwards to listen/watch/read, and once you do you can always raise objections/issues in email afterwards and try to reverse any decisions made in physical meetings. That's better than any other international standards body I've ever participated in. (IEEE, 3GPP, ETSI, ATIS) Some have a more strict submissions in-advance policy, but even for them their physical meetings require high-level English abilities to participate effectively, in practice. I don't see a realistic alternative to that, while still getting things accomplished in a timely manner.
It's easy to say those things since I'm a native English speaker [2], and not a nice concept in general... but if we're honest with ourselves I think we have to recognize the unvarnished truth. Obviously there are exceptions - the 40 page slide-deck full of text is an exception. But those appear to be uncommon cases, afaict.
-hadriel
[1] It's ironic you use the word "Procrustean" in an email about non-native English speakers needing translation. If you'd asked me what the word meant, I'd have guessed it either meant those who enjoyed the edges of bread or pizza, or those who advocate Earth plate tectonics theory.
[2] well, technically English is not my native language, but I learned it at a young enough age to cover that up... mostly.
On Aug 4, 2013, at 7:10 PM, Spencer Dawkins <spencerdawkins.ietf@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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".