And, talking to myself...
I should have updated the subject since it's getting a tad OT. But, to bring this back to Nomcom, I do think we have a way in which remote individuals can effectively participate in Nomcom. We have video technology and as I said below that is extremely effective for communicating. And, I think it can be effective for Nomcom interviews. In the last job I had, the hiring manager was in India and we did the interview over Skype. I worked in his organization for 4 years and never met him in person. This hiring manager in India had shifted his work schedule to be more compatible with North America as the majority of his team was here. It does require some flexibility on the part of the individuals involved. But, I honestly believe that if someone who has participated primarily remotely is a good listener and does due diligence in terms of reading community input and using that input as well as that gathered from the interviewee (i.e., it should be expected that the interviewers have read the nominees questionnaire - that hasn't always happened in my experience) and asks the right questions during interviews, that this Nomcom voting member could be equally as effective as the average regular IETF attendee. So, I do think there is some truth in Dave's concerns, in terms of the perception of those that aren't IETF regulars.
Regards,
Mary.
On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 9:43 AM, Mary Barnes <mary.h.barnes@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 9:16 AM, Ted Lemon <Ted.Lemon@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:On Feb 13, 2015, at 3:05 AM, Dave Cridland <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> And what do you expect when we make it absolutely clear that this is the only thing that counts?
Dave, to be fair, what Russ actually said was that some people say the most important thing that happens at IETF _meetings_ is hallway conversation. I tend to agree with that in a sense: I think that the discussions that happen in the hallways are actually triggered by people thinking about presentations and discussions that have happened in meetings, so I don't think you can have the one without the other.
One of the things that I obsess about when I'm thinking about attending remotely is how to get the same effect, because I agree with Russ that it's important. But I look at it kind of the opposite of the way you expressed. I think it's important for offsite attendees to be able to participate meaningfully, so what I want is to figure out how we can export the hallway conversations, not how we can exclude people who can't currently access them.
I think Melinda is on to something with her discussion about telecommute-friendly versus in-person environments. Rather than just getting discouraged, I think we should try to actively work on this.
[MB] I totally agree with Melinda's points. I worked in any environment where it was more the norm than the exception to have folks working from home for eons. In my last job, video calls were also the norm. Those can dramatically improve the experience since so much of our communication is visual, which is one of the reasons why hallway interactions and small group discussions can be so effective. I now work in an environment where I am the only one that works from home and the difference in my day to day interactions is startling. People do forgot about you. Audio calls in particular are only about 10-20% effective due to poor audio setup in meeting rooms and whomever is running the meeting not adequately taking into consideration the remote participations.So, personally, I think it's time to consider whether we can do everything on mailing lists between meetings. In one WG I chaired, we had weekly audio calls for our design team, which was comprised of anyone that was willing to contribute to the work (i.e., text, detailed document reviews, etc.). Those can work fine when everyone knows everyone as you've learned to pick up on tones of voice and you know one another fairly well from the face to face meetings. We carefully documented decisions and produced publicly available minutes, etc. There was one participant and key contributor that has only been to one or two of the face to face meetings for the WG. I would posit that these meetings can be equally as effective as face to face meetings in making progress. Once we started those meetings, we didn't find that we needed f2f interim meetings. There of course, the timezone issue with these sorts of meetings, but that can be managed. But, we do have all the tools to make work between meetings more effective and more open to remote participants that I don't think we're taking advantage of.Of course, I still believe that we need face to face meetings for these hallway discussions. I believe that there are, however, some decisions that might be made amongst a smaller group of contributors that ought to be better communicated to other interested parties. I don't think we always do this. And, in the spirit of the transparency that was the objective behind the changes in the email notifications recently, I think folks should ensure, for example that discussions that are related to WG activities are communicated to the WG. This does happen sometimes - just not frequently enough IMHO. I think this touches on Dave Cridland's point.Regards,Mary.[/MB]