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

[Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2022 at 08:47:04AM -0400, Joel M. Halpern wrote:
> Toerless seems to declare that if the participants can not practically
> arrange remote participation options for that discussion then tehy can not
> have that meeting as described?   That seems like hurting ourselves.

In that particular case i got so annoyed about this time, the person who
promoted the ad-hoc side-meeting on the WG microphone in the room during the
WG meeting could have simply asked the room "if there is anyone who could help doing
a remote participation setup, we would appreciate it". That did not happen.

"Good faith effort to not exclude remote" when you are explicitly talking to
a hybrid audience ? Its perfectly fine for remote to be not included once 
you're after the meeting organizing something in-person only with in-person
people.

> It should be remembered that wide ranging discussions can be difficult even
> face to face.  Providing full effective remote participation is desirable,
> but is hard and in my view can't be a requirement for permitting such side
> meetings.

Sure. Participation selection and management is a multi-faceted problem. But i
think that local/remote is in many cases orthogonal to other considerations or
at least it should be IMHO. And i feel that instead, we see location as a welcome
pseuo-argument for discrimination. If you're remote and you're considered important
by the organizers, they will do anything they can to still make it (meeting)
happen with you. If you're not considered important by the organizers, then
they're happy to use the remote argument for exclusion. And i simply disapprove
of thinking like that (as one example).

Cheers
    Toerless

> (The practical reduction of effective discussion in WG meetings
> is much smaller and clearly acceptable.  We have already, for good reasons,
> made sure that the room can hear such things.)
> 
> Yours,
> Joel
> 
> On 3/28/2022 8:23 AM, Wes Hardaker wrote:
> > 
> > 
> >     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
> > 

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