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

[Yoav Nir <[e-mail]>]

> On 27 Mar 2020, at 19:17, Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> I've heard almost every session chairs saying words like "we have X people who have signed the bluesheets, and 2X people who are in WebEx now, please go sign the bluesheet". So that's fine.
> 
> But I'm also noticing that there are about X people in Jabber, and honestly, this week, the jabber rooms are incredibly active - probably because they're playing the part of hallway discussions for each session. That's been especially true for BOFs, but almost every session has had a non-stop active jabber room for most/all of the session. 
> 
> 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. 
> 
> Are other people noticing the same thing?
> 

Yes, and in some ways this is concerning. I don’t think the Webex is giving chairs and ADs a “feel of the room”.

For example, yesterday in privacypass we had a presentation about the problem they are solving complete with swimtrack diagrams.  The presentation ended with a slide asking if people understood the issues and the proposed solution. There were some questions, but that’s not where the real conversation was. The real conversation happened in Jabber, and people were questioning the assumptions, what the problem was, and what was this privacy that it was supposed to be protecting.  It was a very real, technical discussion, but the proponents were not really there. They were busy with the presentations.

The Webex session moved on to proposed token formats, which is a solution detail, and to conversation about whether the (proposed) group should deal only with the web or also other things. All this time, the Jabber conversation was still about the basic assumptions.

If you listen to nothing but the Webex recording, it seems like there was consensus and a bunch of people volunteering to review/contribute/implement.  If you read the Jabber log, it looks like we’re not even sure what this is trying to accomplish.  In a real face-to-face meeting, some of this jabber conversation would spill into the mic line. Here they were rather separate.  I don’t know how we can judge consensus for such a session.  

Yoav