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

[Tero Kivinen <[e-mail]>]

Toerless Eckert writes:
> Hmm..
> 
> On Fri, Mar 25, 2022 at 06:03:22PM +0000, Mike Bishop wrote:
> > Indeed. The number of passionate disagreements that can be solved
> > by "The four people who care are going to go have lunch, then
> > present a consensus position at tomorrow's session" cannot be
> > understated. In virtual land, the arguments stretch on for weeks
> > or months.
> 
> If exactly and only the very same four people would have had lunch
> together via gather.town in a privat corner, how much
> different/worse would the result have been ?

The problem is that is it is almost impossible to get it working in
gather or other online tool. 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.

Secondly one of those four people would have company meeting right
after the session, thus they would not be able to attend this kind of
lunch meeting at that short notice. Third person would most likely
want to fix some lunch at home during the break, and could not
concentrate on the lunch meeting while actually preparing food
(compared to the case where restaurant staff makes food for you). So
only one of the four people would really end up in gather, and then he
would wonder what was there that was supposed to be discussed here...

> IMHO, if those people knew each other from in before in person, the
> virtual meeting would come quite close, maybe even better if some
> more tooling at home/gather would have helped (restaurant napkins
> have their limits).

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. I myself do it all the time during
virtual meetings. On the other hand I sometimes do it also during
onsite meetings, but then that is usually much more noticeable to
others in the meeting, and they will wake me up if there is something
important to discuss...

During this IETF there were several cases where I was able to solve an
issue, just by seeing the right person during the break and talking to
him. If I would have needed to go and hunt him through gather, or
arrange special zoom etc meetign with him that would have never
happened, as I only really realized that he is correct person to ask
when I actually saw him on break.
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