On 8/4/2013 8:36 PM, Hadriel Kaplan wrote:
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.
Oh, I wouldn't dream of having rules about that. What I was trying to
say in my not-enough-sleep-last-week way was that I was imagining so
many justifiable exceptions (chair slides, on-the-fly hums, reports from
design teams and hallway conversations the day before) that having rules
wouldn't help, so, agreed.
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)
Right, but Fuyou was talking about *spoken* English being more
challenging than written English (if you can't *read* English fairly
quickly, drafts and mailing lists are impenetrable, and you're done in
the IETF). I'm told that it's easier for non-native English speakers to
read slides than to parse spoken English for anyone who talks faster
than I do.
I'm not saying that should override other considerations. I was
responding to a question several people asked, if anyone would benefit
from having slides early (for the purposes of this e-mail, 24 hours
early would be plenty early enough). Other people provided other
answers, and I hadn't seen that answer go past.
Thanks,
Spencer
p.s. I DID footnote "Procrustean" with a definition, but that's
perfectly reasonable to point to as "not helpful for non-native English
speakers" - please feel free to keep me relatively honest.