Hi Vinayak,
At 06:09 AM 8/12/2013, Vinayak Hegde wrote:
There has been a lot of discussion on the IETF mailing list regarding
improving remote participation and improving diversity on the mailing
lists and in the working groups. I think the two are related. I think
everyone broadly agrees that remote participation can be better. If
nothing else, it will tell about who the remote participants are. I
had proposed a few steps in this direction by improving the data
collection for remote participation in the IAOC Sunday meeting.
Posting them below again for discussion on the mailing lists.
It can be a simple form that asks the following questions (Can be
refined - this is just a start)
1. Name:
2. Country:
3. Duration of participation in IETF (either in number of years or
number of meetings)
4. Employer ?
5. Working groups interested in.
This can be voluntary and can be done pre-IETF meeting. As of now
there is no structured way to know how many people wre active in the
jabber room or listening on the audio stream.
As the data collection is voluntary it should not be a problem to ask
for the information mentioned above.
I can see that this has multiple benefits.
1. If the number of participants in a certain WG is more, it would
push the WG chair to request for the slides/agenda available earlier.
I suggest asking the working group for the agenda if it is not available.
2. If there are consistently more participation from around the world,
the the WG chair can request for a meetecho recording so people can
follow the group even if they cannot attend the meeting live. This
could be useful for people who have clashing schedules as well.
Yes.
3. Over a longer period of time, it can help IETF plan and encourage
remote participation. Currently there is no hard data on number of
remote participants. There is however a lot of hand waving so this
will get some useful data into the system.
There is the usual hand waving. :-) It is a good start. The
information available over a period of time might provide a view of
whether there is any improvement in remote participation.
At 08:56 AM 8/12/2013, Vinayak Hegde wrote:
This was a suggestion but I don't think it will work well. OTOH an
argument can be made that money gathered from charging remote
participants can be used to fund better tools for remote
participation.
After reading about the remote participation issues which have been
discussed on this mailing list I don't think that the problem is the tools.
Regards,
S. Moonesamy