On 08/06/2013 11:06 AM, Andrew Feren wrote:
On 08/06/2013 09:08 AM, Keith Moore wrote:
On 08/04/2013 02:54 PM, Ted Lemon wrote:
While I think getting slides in on time is great for a lot of
reasons, reading the slides early isn't that important. What is
important is that remote people see the slides at the same time as
local people. For that, it seems to me that Meetecho support does
exactly what is needed. You just follow the slideshow online,
along with the audio.
I agree that remote people should see the slides at the same time as
local people, except that I think that in both cases this should be
well before the meeting. The slides shouldn't be shown at the
meeting unless needed to illustrate a point of active discussion.
People keep acting as if the purpose of these meetings - the reason
people spend thousands of euro and travel thousands of km - is to
watch slides.
Hi Keith,
I think this sort of misses the point. At least for me as a remote
participant.
Actually I think the desire to get slides out early largely misses the
point. Or at least, it's an effort optimizing what should be the rare
case.
I fully agree that slides should be easily available to both local and
remote participants well prior to any meeting in which a presentation
will be made. (Say a plenary session where presentations are normal and
appropriate.) While speakers might like to revise their slides at the
last minute, there's no reason why they shouldn't be expected to upload
preliminary slides well in advance (because the key to an effective
presentation is good preparation, after all) and a revised version (if
necessary) later. This isn't at all rocket science, and there's no
reason why it should not be done.
But if we really want to make remote participation effective, we need to
figure out better ways to involve remote participants in _discussions_ -
not only in plenaries, WG meetings, BOFs, etc., but also in hallway and
bar conversations. Having a local speaker read something from a laptop
that was typed into a Jabber session by a remote participant is better
than nothing. But surely we can do better.
As of today when the slides are available (or if there are no slides
and just talk) I can follow WG meetings quite well. Being able to
actively engage in any discussion remotely is, IMO, pretty much
limited to the mailing lists. Getting involved in an active
discussion at a WG meeting remotely is currently difficult at best and
impossible at worst.
It used to be the case that Internet access at IETF meetings was flaky,
either because of the wireless network or because of the network
connection or both. More recently the performance of the meeting
Internet access has been stellar. If we put the same kind of effort
into facilitating remote participation in discussions, I suspect we
could move from "difficult at best and impossible at worse" to "works
well". Of course, it might take awhile, but it's those very kinds of
discussions that are so essential to broad consensus that (when it
works) makes our standards effective. The fact that it doesn't work
well now is not a good argument for not making it work well in the future.
(We're supposed to be creating the future, after all. That's our job.)
It's also the case that the fact that facilities for involving remote
participants in conversation haven't historically worked well, is used
as a justification for continuing to have this dysfunctional style of
conducting working group meetings, thus making very poor use of local
participants' time and money.
I'm all for making presentation slides available to local and remote
participants well before the meeting. But if we're only concerned with
making presentation slides available, we're selling ourselves very
short. That's the point I'm trying to make.
Keith