Hi Keith,
Thanks for clarifying. Put that way I agree 100%.
-Andrew
On 08/06/2013 02:03 PM, Keith Moore wrote:
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