Re: [108attendees] Successful IETF 108

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On Aug 4, 2020, at 3:42 PM, Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> I can un-mute them when they want to talk and can’t figure out the mute button,
> 
> (That might be a controversial feature.)
> 
>> and I can see peoples’ faces to know that they want to talk when they are a bit shy. 
> 
> Adding a gallery view of the attendance might be a nice feature request.
> 
> So I agree Zoom may be more appropriate for your meditation classes.
> For teaching, I like BigBlueButton (and so do other SDOs for their meetings, I hear).
> With a few features stolen from that, meetecho could be quite useful.

I think I see the disconnect here. Working groups at this point are highly formalized; the discussion that e.g. Randy spoke of hardly ever happens in working group meetings.

I consider this a serious problem.  The point of getting together in realtime to have verbal discussions is that synergy happens when we do this. The best mic-line discussions are the ones where ideas are going back and forth between people quickly, not the mic lines where everybody gets to have their say, linearly. That’s just not how human beings best communicate.

What I want out of a WG meeting is what my students want out of a meditation meeting: a really good discussion. That’s what we have in my meditation classes. We used to have that in working groups, and we still sometimes do, but it’s the exception, not the rule. Maybe this is a reflection on the way the mic line moderation is done, maybe it’s just that the wrong people are showing up. But I have an existence proof that I can use Zoom to do what I want to see done in working groups, and I have no such existence proof for Meetecho—quite the opposite.