Re: [112attendees] WG followup discussions in gather.town (was: Re: HotRFC Gather followup)

[Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[e-mail]>]

Trying to behave, but I wanted to pop in on one point.

On Tue, Nov 9, 2021 at 8:45 AM Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]> wrote:

> I used zoom side meetings. COmparison between it and gather is
> IMHO not binary but i see pro/cons for either. And i wouldn't
> have an idea for a simple common superset. But i wold contend that
> what is missing in meetecho is better amended by gather than
> zoom style side meetings.
>

OK, maybe two, but they're related.

I was hosting a Zoom meeting yesterday with about 60-ish participants, and
it looked to me (as host) that it would have been useful if someone could
have said

   - here's a large space that we can spread out into,
   - so that the people who (here's the key) "think  that 'media' means
   'interactive video' can talk to each other, and people who think it means
   'streaming video' can talk to each other, and people who think it includes
   'gaming' can talk to each other",
   - and (for extra credit) maybe even come back, or send a
   participant back, and report on what happened in their breakout room.

It seems that's more Gather-ish than Zoom-ish, and it's definitely an IETF
kind of thing.

(at a minimum, AFAIK, don't you have to be the Zoom meeting host to assign
people to breakout rooms? and if I'm in one Zoom breakout room and want to
pop into another one, can I do that?)

My second thing is that what I do in Gather is mostly "look at the
participant list, find someone I need to talk to, and Follow them until I
find them". If I was just wandering around in Gather, and didn't recognize
most of the names for people I need to talk to (whether I know them or
not), I'd be pretty frustrated, too. That's what I did, at the first IETF
where we had Gather, and I'm getting a lot more out of Gather now..

If it was possible to look up people by roles ("editor for
draft-foo-bar-baz"?), that would be a bit more useful for new participants.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

Best,

Spencer, who has other thoughts, perhaps best expressed on a post-IETF 112
survey, which I will definitely fill out!