Re: about remote attendance and hallway discussions

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On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 11:52 AM, Michael Richardson <mcr+ietf@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Mary Barnes <mary.h.barnes@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
    > 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.

For the remote participant, the most important thing that the physical
meeting does it to establish a time zone, and force everyone else to conform
to that.  Additionally, by removing people from their office, it removes a
whole host of "distractions": bosses, spouses, kids, commutes,...

One of the things that I think we could try is to have a meeting with dozens
to hundreds of locations.

It would still be 5 days long.
It would have a primary location in order to establish a time zone for it.
It would have a schedule, and agenda and conflict resolution.
It's just that I would go stay in a nearby hotel and/or conference center,
and I'd have to have lunch or do social events with nearby people.
[MB] Right. That's a choice you make because you feel it's important to optimize
your participation.  I'm making the same choice for the Dallas meeting, but I don't think
that sort of thing is a general factor for planning a meeting (i.e., how many people have to 
stay at a hotel even with this model).  [/MB]

It would an experiment.
 
 [MB]  Personally, I don't think the logistics of arranging this are at all worth the efforts.
That all said, maybe we could setup a wiki for remote participants that are willing to make
local arrangements for the meetings for folks in the area to get together for various sessions.
Although, with our remote participation tools, I don't see a huge advantage other than of 
course enabling informal discussions.   
[/MB]

The hardest thing for me, when attending remotely, is convincing my kid (who
wakes up at 5am regularly), is that I'm "at work" at that time, and that
when it's time for me to sleep (in remote time zone), that I really do need
to sleep. 
[MB] That's well understood. But, again not something that applies to all remote 
participants.  Also, you need to consider the fact that at every meeting we have the 
majority of the attendees not in their own timezone - just look around the meeting rooms
and see the folks that are falling asleep or sleeping in various chairs and couches around
the meeting venue.   Just because we're all physically in the same timezone doesn't mean 
we all physiologically in the same time zone. 

I think we need to focus on the things we can change.  We can't totally eliminate the timezone 
issue (even for face to face meetings) and we certainly can't make adjustments that address everyone's 
personal life challenges.  We all have to balance those - even when we are at f2f meetings, we
usually create another set of personal life challenges.   
[/MB] 


--
Michael Richardson <mcr+IETF@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, Sandelman Software Works
 -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-





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