On 2020-04-17, at 22:28, Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > But we don't need presentation times. They have always been a huge waste of f2f meeting time. Yes, we have sat through sequences of bad presentations. The problem with bad presentations is not that they are presentations, it’s that they are bad. We are doing these meetings to advance consensus on technical issues. These issues often are complex. **A presentation is often the best way to make a complex technical argument; challenging the points of a presentation in real time is often by far the best way to make a counter-argument.** > 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. Yeah, right. This is a prime example of process confabulation. We SHOULD all be perfectly prepared when going into meetings. Well, if everyone were perfectly prepared, everyone already would agree on the right decisions and we would already have consensus! That’s just not the way things actually work. > 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. Yes, we can take a lot of things into the asynchronous domain, like we did with mail already. Moving tutorial-like and status-update background stuff into “meeting materials” that must be consumed ahead of the meeting (did you notice the RFC 2119 MUST here? Hah. Let’s have entrance exams for WG meetings.). Doing things synchronously in a meeting can be more efficient in ensuring there is a common basis for discussions. I have been through many bad discussions. Where most of the people at the microphone are missing some basic facts, not even understanding the question or the choices to be made. Something a good presentation or two could have cleared that up before we actually go into the discussion. I wish we could squash that indiscriminate “presentations are bad” meme. It is not making good use of the evidence about how our meetings actually work. We should instead focus on finding ways to make good use of our synchronous time, which certainly includes eliminating the bad presentations, but really needs to focus on making informed decisions. Grüße, Carsten
