On Fri, Apr 17, 2020 at 4:30 PM Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> 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.
<dead horse num_hats=0>
This only works if people actually do view them before they show up at
the meeting.
If one asks "How many people have read the draft?" you often only get
a very small number of hands, even for short, easy documents. This is
especially true for new documents - before people have seen a
presentation about it, they don't seem to know enough to object -
Cunningham's Law ("the best way to get the right answer on the
internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.")
works even more for documents - the best way to get feedback is to say
something wrong in the draft / presentation.
If people won't read the document or even the abstract ahead of time,
why do you think that they will sit and watch a video / read the
slides? Yes, in an ideal world people would post their -00, and within
a day or two get twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with
circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining
what's wrong, and replacement text -- but, sadly, that's not the world
we live in.
Presentations make people understand **why** they dislike a draft
enough that they should spend the time working to make it less
objectionable...
W
</dead horse>
> 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
>
>
--
I don't think the execution is relevant when it was obviously a bad
idea in the first place.
This is like putting rabid weasels in your pants, and later expressing
regret at having chosen those particular rabid weasels and that pair
of pants.
---maf
