Top-posting, just to thank you for this note. I'd guess we're going to learn a lot about what we need to be prepared, from watching other organizations who have already canceled and are (attempting to) go fully virtual.
We may end up canceling, too, but if we're able to hold a meaningful onsite meeting with significantly greater remote participation than usual, we can still learn a lot, and can be prepared for any all-virtual IETF in the future.
Best,
Spencer
On Thu, Feb 27, 2020 at 4:01 AM Vittorio Bertola <vittorio.bertola=40open-xchange.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Il 27/02/2020 08:33 Roni Even (A) <roni.even@xxxxxxxxxx> ha scritto:
Hi,
I participated in tsvwg virtual meeting last week that had about 30 participants using IETF webex.. If this is a demonstration of holding a virtual meeting in my view we are not ready. I kept losing the audio of the meeting and I was not alone, others complained in the chat window. The suggestion was to use a PSTN connection to the meeting and not the IP one. This mean that I will have to pay for international call since there was no local free call in number. Note that it was an audio only plus data, no video.
As ICANN (who has decided to go fully online) is discovering, even if you solved the infrastructural problem (which they apparently plan to solve by using Zoom), there are many problems in running a purely virtual meeting, in addition to the basic ones of missing all the informal interaction, which is usually key to getting the hardest issues solved, and of crippling the emotional and non-verbal communication, which leads much more easily to confrontation.
For example, the timezone problem: no matter which timezone you are in, there will be people for which the meeting will be out of working hours, often during the night. While your employer and your family will accept to "lose" you for a week if you go physically elsewhere, it is much harder to get that accepted if you are home - they will easily still expect you to be available during the day at least for important stuff. As a minimum, your attention will be partly diverted and your physical state will be hampered, and as a maximum, you will miss good chunks of the meeting. In some cases, working at night would even be incompatible with local labour laws..
Or the connectivity problem: possibly this is stronger for ICANN, which has a significant share of participants from parts of the world where connectivity is worse, but not everyone has broadband connectivity readily available; actually, many African participants told ICANN that they do not have any connectivity at home, and they only connect from an office which will be closed during the daytime of the timezone of the meeting. And if they have connectivity, e.g. through mobile networks, it's often prohibitively expensive for day-long connections. Actually, if you end up having to use good old telephone calls, it will often be prohibitively expensive even in the "developed" world; and while travel is even more expensive, funding for travel is often available in ways that funding for (personal) connectivity is not.
More generally, people with worse connectivity will have harder times in understanding others (especially if English is not their mother tongue), being given the floor, making their points, gaining support for them etc (though some careful chairmanship could partly address this).
I'm not saying that these problems cannot be addressed, but it's important to consider them; it's false that meeting online always increases opportunities for participation, it just creates a different set of problems and of disadvantaged people.
P.S. Now for the less topical part - sorry but I have to say this:
> Il 26/02/2020 02:00 Casey Farrell <caseyfarrell26@xxxxxxxxx> ha scritto:
>
> https://www.yahoo.com/news/san-franciscos-mayor-declared-state-225239441.html
It's nice to see that politicians overreacting and spreading panic globally just to show their local voters that they "do something about it" are not a prerogative of Italy only!
--
Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
vittorio.bertola@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy
