Re: [113attendees] hybrid meetings: the worst of both worlds

[Wes Hardaker <[e-mail]>]

>
>
>
> Taking your four person exmple. Firstly
> one of the four people would not be in the meeting at all, as it
> happened to be 3am for him, and he did not consider the meeting
> important enough to wake just for that. For onsite meeting it would be
> normal working hours thus he would wonder in to meeting that is not
> really important to him, but which he knows lot about, meaning his
> input to the discussion would be very important.
>
[...]

Good analogies in that group of examples (all true).  But the flip side is
also true though: person 5 in this scenario was left out of the 4-count
entirely because they would have never interacted with the IETF since it
was too expensive for his company/world-region to consider attending and
thus their voice and perspective was lost.  I'm sure the IETF has lost some
participants in the last 2 years because of the lack of in-person
engagement, but we've also picked up a few that only participated for the
first time because it was possible for the first time [I had a number of
good conversations with a few of them in gather].

When working out issues, I think any webex/zoom/jitsi/meetecho meeting
> is not as good as having people in the same meeting room and actually
> concentrating on the meeting. With all these tooling people are very
> often not fully concentrating themselves to the meeting, as it is so
> easy to do other things at the same time and other people in the
> meting does not usually notice it.


FYI, my perception is this is about an equal split.  My pictures of rooms
full of IETF members before and after laptops became the norm are very
different.  Afterward, 90% of the audience is looking at their laptops.  It
would be interesting to figure out a way to see if people notice (eg) slide
changes more or less frequently in person for in-virtual, since if you have
a monitor devoted to the slides you might see the slide change and wake
your attention a bit.  It seems that way to me but I have no way to measure
it.

Don't get me wrong: face-to-face is better in so so many ways.  But trying
to boost the tools for remote participation can only help make
participation levels itself better, even if we get back to the point where
the larger percentage is in person.

-- 
Wes Hardaker
USC/ISI