On 8/8/2013 7:53 AM, Scott Brim wrote:
Well, I've worked remotely for 16 years and in most meetings I don't get to see the slides until the meeting starts. Usually I can only see them via some conferencing tool. Sometimes I get a copy in mail the week after. So I think the IETF is already doing pretty well at making materials available, and insisting on getting slides far in advance of the meeting is beyond what most people get in reality outside of the IETF. I would call this a SHOULD not a MUST.
suspect Scott's experiences matches that of many of us, but let's consider possible sampling bias here, which might limit the applicability of that experience to the IETF...
There is a difference between being a native English speaker who is already integrated into an on-going work effort, versus someone who might be neither, as is often true for IETF meetings.
Informative slides that are available ahead of time can be extremely helpful, for establishing the context of the presentation/discussion and for outlining the main points.
For someone new to a topic or with language limitations, that can make the difference between understanding the flow of speech, versus not.
So let's be careful about whether slides ahead of time need to be a requirement, rather than being considered only a nice-to-have.
d/ -- Dave Crocker Brandenburg InternetWorking bbiw.net