On 4/17/20 4:15 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
On 18-Apr-20 05:27, Keith Moore wrote:
On 4/17/20 12:58 PM, Bob Hinden wrote:
"The time of day of the meeting was too difficult for me to participate" 47%
Almost half of the responses said this. This seems like an inherent problem with virtual meetings, probably accounts for the answers to question 1, "In what region do you live?”. This showed 53% from US and Canada, and 31% from Europe. Very little elsewhere. I wish there was a solution to this, but it’s clearly going to have a significant effect on IETF attendance until we can start having face to face meetings again.
I suspect there's a way to structure virtual meetings to enable more
effective participation from a wider variety of locations.
Sent at 05:27 in my time zone. Replying at 08:10 in my time zone, to observe
that this is exactly why the IETF's decision making occurs on mailing lists,
or the data tracker, not in meetings. We should make more use of that.
For example, I've seen people asking for "presentation" slots in virtual
meetings. No! We can all read drafts and slides at any time we choose.
I'd even accept slides with audio commentary. But I'm not going to get
up at 3 a.m. to hear someone reading out their slides.
One of the most important purposes of the f2f meetings has been that the
3x yearly meetings have served as deadlines to revise work. I suspect
that we still need deadlines.
But we don't need presentation times. They have always been a huge
waste of f2f meeting time. Now that we're not likely to be meeting f2f
for another year or two, is a good time to get rid of them. Even when
we go back to meeting f2f, prepare the presentations in advance and let
us view them before we show up at the meeting. For that matter, skip
the presentation entirely (it's much faster to read than to listen to
speech) and just post the slides (which are, admittedly, sometimes
easier to digest than the I-Ds). Add comments to the slides if it helps.
Keith
