--On Friday, August 16, 2013 04:59 -0400 "Joel M. Halpern"
<jmh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Maybe I am missing something.
> The reason we have face-to-face meetings is because there is
> value in such meetings that can not reasonably be achieved in
> other ways.
> I would like remote participation to be as good as possible.
> But if would could achieve "the same as being there" then we
> should seriously consider not meeting face-to-face.
> Conversely, until the technology gets that good, we must not
> penalize the face-to-face meeting for failures of the
> technology.
Joel,
I certainly agree with your conclusion. While I hope the intent
wasn't to penalize the face-to-face meeting, there have been
several suggestions in this thread that I believe are
impractical and a few that are probably undesirable even if they
were practical. Others, such as improved automation, are
practical if we want to make the effort, would probably help,
and, fwiw, have been suggested by multiple people in multiple
threads.
I do believe it would be helpful for everyone involved in the
discussion to be careful about their reactions and rhetoric.
While it is certainly possible to go too far in any given
direction, significant and effective remote participation will
almost certainly require some adjustments by the people in the
room. We've already made some of those adjustments: for example
while it is inefficient and sometimes doesn't work well, using
Jabber as inbound channel with someone in the room reading
Jabber input at the Mic does help remote participants at some
cost to the efficient flow of the f2f discussions.
Perhaps that penalizes the face to face participants. I believe
it is worth it and that it would be worthwhile going somewhat
further in that direction, e.g., by treating remote participants
as a separate mic queue. I also see it as very closely related
to some other tradeoffs: for example, going to extra effort to
be inclusive and diverse requires extra effort by existing f2f
participants and very carefully balancing costs -- higher costs
and even costs at current levels discourage broader participants
but many ways of increasing diversity also increase costs.
Wrt "not meeting face-to-face", I don't see it happening, even
with technology improvements. On the other hand, the absolutely
most effective thing we could do to significantly decrease costs
for those who need the f2f meetings but are cost-sensitive would
be to reverse the trends toward WG substituting interim meetings
for work on mailing lists, toward extending the IETF meeting
week to include supplemental meetings, and even to move toward
two, rather than three, meetings a year. Those changes,
especially the latter two, would probably require that remote
participation be much more efficient and effective than it is
today, but would not require nearly the level of perfection
required to eliminate f2f meetings entirely. And any of the
three would "penalize" those who like going to extended f2f
meetings and/or prefer working that way and who have effectively
unlimited travel support and related resources.
best,
john