Re: [107attendees] Where the action is, at virtual meetings ...

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On Mar 27, 2020, at 12:17 PM, Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[e-mail]> wrote:
> There are a lot of conversations there, that aren't making it into the mike line, so roughly half the people in WebEx aren't seeing them, and in the cases I'm familiar with, the jabber conversation has been at least as well-informed and serious as the voice conversation. And the voice conversation doesn't always end up in the same place as the jabber conversation. 

This is natural.  The way the IETF does mic lines is useful for making progress on technical issues, but kind of sucks for controversial issues.  We could almost certainly come up with a more effective consensus-building process than a linear mic line.  Jabber has better quality because it’s free-form, so people don’t just get one shot at expressing themselves.  Communication is an iterative process—often when I speak at the mic and then hear the next people, I realize that I didn’t express myself well and want to clarify, but it’s too late.  This isn’t a problem when there aren’t very many people in the discussion, but it breaks down quickly when there are.

> Are other people noticing the same thing?

Yes.  However.

Jabber is not point and click.  It took me until halfway through the second meeting I attended before I figured out what I was doing wrong and got it working.   Yes, there is a lot of good conversation in the jabber room, although it goes by pretty fast.   If we want jabber to be more democratic, we need to make it point and click.  Which probably means we need something other than jabber, or else need to spend a lot of money building better tools.