(I do generally try to avoid high Narten scores, but...) John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx> wrote: > >... but there is an issue that more and fancier protocols and/or > hardware doesn't solve, which is that running these things well > and at high quality tends to need serious operational commitments, > which means more staff. There will be costs, but they _could_ be quite minimal: > One can reduce the staff requirement somewhat with _really_ fancy > and expensive technology, but the tradeoff may not be wonderful. > I'm not talking about the complex technical stuff here, I'm talking > about things closer to "camera gives good view of carpet" and > "if that speaker is going to pace the floor while talking, > either the camera needs to follow or someone needs to apply a > short leash" These don't require on-site staff to notice, so probably these could be _entirely_ covered by volunteers. Doing something about it probably would require on-site staff -- but that's needed to make the sound+picture useful to archive the session anyway... > to say nothing of the perennial microphone announcement, "MY NAME > IS <mumble>". That's really no worse for remote participants. > Similarly, very high quality remote participation with lots of > participants at lots of different locations tends to either put > a premium on participant training and/or typing speed and/or a > requirement for trained moderators who can control both in-room > and remote conversation flow. Again, not really technical > issues, but not so easy to resolve, at least without cultural > changes. Actually, there are many conferencing systems which already have solutions to these problems. It's just a learning-curve issue -- and so far we've avoided learning them. >... Again, be careful what you wish for, lest trying to optimize > for people attending face to face meetings while not requiring so > much travel, bring a situation in which almost all of the people > at a meeting in Region X are from Region X, almost all of those > at a meeting in Region Y are from Region Y, etc. That loss of > diversity in individual f2f meetings, even if it improved > statistical diversity over a year or two, would not, IMO, be a > desirable outcome. +1 -- John Leslie <john@xxxxxxx>