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

As a remote participant, I definitely felt like I had a second class technical and social experience. This translated into radically less participation. Unfortunately, this is a very common pattern for hybrid events and not something I would not expect to be fixed without quite a bit of additional, ongoing efforts. 

- in one session, my audio when speaking came through so quiet that it was unusable. Humorously, there was also quite a loud delayed echo of my own voice as I spoke, significantly louder than in-person participants were getting. AFAICT, there was no attempt to resolve this technical issue, which occurred multiple times before my attempt.

- in another session, the audio was miscalibrated badly enough for the first 5-10 minutes that I turned audio off for the presentation until there was an indication in chat that it was fixed. If the audio in-person was that poor, I doubt the session would have started.

- in yet another session, a remote presenter found themselves unable to do so due to technical issues. My impressions were these technical issues were not due to their local environment or networking. Luckily, there was someone onsite as a backup for the presentation.

- Meetecho had unusable overlapping layout on mobile, at least as initiated from the calendar events. The session I attempted to take via my iPhone did not appear to have the presentation visible or available due to these problems.

- Meetecho seemed to respond to any network or technical glitch in the individual streams would cut audio and video off until the page was reloaded, without indication of error. This made me especially dislike how there is a multi-step camera-and-mic setup on each reload. I had to do this multiple times in each of the sessions I attended.

- the majority of side sessions were not remotely accessible

- hallway conversations don’t have a viable mechanism yet to pull the two groups of participants together.

From this experience, I have no intention to participate in future IETF unless I can either participate onsite or it is a fully remote event.

I regret attempting to attend this IETF. With the issues I had participating in discussions as well as viewing live presentations, I feel I would have made far more efficient use of my time just reviewing slides and minutes.

-DW

On Mar 25, 2022, at 7:34 AM, Leif Johansson <leifj@sunet.se> wrote:
> 
> 
> I spent the week onsite in Wienna...
> 
> As usual the arrangements are great and the local host made this a very nice experience.
> 
> And then there is the hybrid meeting thing... imo hybrid works well as technology and completely sucks on a human level.
> 
> This statement may be controversial and/or unpopular in the IETF where we're all about the tech but...
> 
> - hybrid means there is not enough folks onsite to create critical mass for the "hallway track"
> - remote-participation is arguably better for the technical WG process than onsite at this point
> - remote is really bad for the informal discussions (gather is very disappointing imo)
> 
> The most efficient WG were where most of the contributurs had decided to show up onsite.
> 
> The most important discussions I had were (as usual) not in a WG meeting.
> 
> Maybe the IETF needs to rehink the purpouse of onsite meetings.
> 
> We have made the remote experience so good that the "professionalized" aspect of churning out RFCs doesn't really need onsite.
> 
> However, an IETF with no human interaction might be professional but it won't be efficient.
> 
> 	Cheers Leif
> 
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