Re: [108attendees] Successful IETF 108

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

> 
> Recording video of even marginally useable quality is a huge undertaking for most people. I suspect the percentage of IETF contributers that have the skills, time, resources, and inclination to do so is small.

I think we mostly expect that people can present into meetecho.
If meetecho had an (off-meeting) recording function, these same people could create videos.  (Maybe add a basic editing function to edit out false starts.)

> A push in this direction would create huge new barrier to participation.

I definitely know what you mean (moving all of our teaching online here quickly revealed that a large part of our educators are far away from having those skills).  But, to a large part, this was missing software.  The other part is having a facilitator that helps with the process, and some educators wouldn’t want us to know that they needed that facilitator for a full transition, so they decided they’d do their normal lectures and just have someone transmit them via Zoom.

> Sure, we have a few people who are good at this, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

So let’s make it easy.

> IMO, If we have hopes of reducing synchronous time, we need to get further away from the idea of “presentations” at all.  The old days of reading drafts and discussing via email handled this better than we do today (with the possible exception of groups that do most everything in github.)

Of course I wish everybody (me included) had read every draft at the start of the meeting; our propensity for monster events makes that hard (but the situation actually is not much better for an interim).  

The point of a “presentation” is to have a high-bandwidth way to prompt discussion, and the seed for the discussion may not even be in a draft.  E-Mail messages to the list are tiny “presentations”, just without images and video, and with a low-bandwidth text channel only.  Life trains us to just skim these things, so many email discussions are repetitive and unproductive.  A video nudges you to sit there and listen (or ignore the video, but then we are not having a conversation).  [Yes, this is a bug and a feature.  And I watch most videos I get at 2.0x.  Except when ekr speaks...]

Grüße, Carsten