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

On Fri, Mar 27, 2020 at 1:00 PM Ted Lemon <mellon@fugue.com> wrote:

> On Mar 27, 2020, at 12:17 PM, Spencer Dawkins at IETF <
> spencerdawkins.ietf@gmail.com> 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.
>

+100 to that. As a 2-year newbie to IETF I have found it hard to get into
the Jabber rooms for the meetings. I have only read the logs of the Jabber
discussions after the meetings so have not been able to participate live.

Another usability issue with Jabber for newcomers: Most members use less
descriptive names on Jabber so it takes a while to map a person I know in
the physical world (from their WG list comments/document names/hallways
discussions) to their Jabber handle. Not sure of the solution but something
that more directly maps the handle to the person's name.

>
>
> --
> 107attendees mailing list
> 107attendees@ietf.org
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/107attendees
>