[113attendees] remote-inclusiveness (was: Re: hybrid meetings: the worst of both worlds)

[Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]>]

Ok. I'll bite. Here is my hybrid rant:

One wish i have is that people on-site should be remote-inclusive whenever
they do announce/organize an activity that easily could include remote
participation.

This week i had to again to an announcement of an ad-hoc side-meeting at a WG
meeting, where immediately remote participants asked if/how to participate remotely,
and the organizer said "no remote participation, but we'll send notes". IMHO that
is unacceptable. Especially when it is planned to be meeting somewhere in the
IETF hotel, where it is easily possible to just have a notebook or cell phone with
gather.town or any RTCweb tool and a Jabra Speak for great audio with remote
participants.

Maybe a few Jabra Speak loaner at the registration desk or the like could help.
and some easy wiki page explaining easy setups.  Its really puzzling how we're
inventing so much great dog food for remote, and then at the easiest of opportunities,
we don't eat it.

And for those remote-seggregationists who explicitly want to discriminate,
i would suggest that announcements about any such activities can
ONLY go to an on-site "white"-board, like what we used in the ietf before we
started to use these remote-friendly tools like wiki pages. But IMHO, whenever
remote accessible IETF/WG space is used to announce activities, we should look for
those to be remote-friendly as much as possible.

And no: using the words "bar" and "bof" together is not a valid excuse for
remote discrimination. Especially given how every time the audio of a chosen
location is too bad to include remote participants for an actual technical discussion, 
it is likely also too bad to include non-native-english participants well (SnR/comprehension/...).

At least i had exactly that frustrating experience in several actual loud-bar BoF
meetings in the past, which i totally despised for exactly that reason. But i think
there are now fewer of those.

Cheers
    Toerless

On Fri, Mar 25, 2022 at 05:36:12PM +0100, Ted Lemon wrote:
> My experience of the meeting was that I had several really important
> conversations that I hadn't planned to have, nor would have had if we
> hadn't met. So it was definitely a net positive for me. The hallway
> conversations are precisely the thing that we miss being remote. I like the
> "gather area" idea, but I think it probably needs a bit more thought, and
> we'd have to arrange it so that people who didn't want to be on camera
> weren't accidentally captured, while still making it something you'd run
> into randomly. A difficult conundrum.
> 
> As to the actual WG meetings, I am realizing that one of the main purposes
> of these meetings is to trigger hallway discussions. I don't think that was
> ever as obvious to me as it's been this time, because before this it was
> just what happened normally. IOW, not that the sessions don't matter at
> all—they do—but the synergy of sessions triggering discussions is what
> makes in-person IETF meetings what they are.
> 
> Leif, I suspect that I was luckier than you were about which people with
> whom I needed to talk to showed up in person. Of course having most people
> show up in person makes that less of a crap shoot.
> 
> On Fri, Mar 25, 2022 at 5:09 PM Robert Moskowitz <[e-mail]>
> wrote:
> 
> >
> >
> > On 3/25/22 11:57, Antoine FRESSANCOURT wrote:
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> >
> > This was my first in person IETF meeting and while I enjoyed meeting people in person in the hallway and put a face on names I see on the mailing lists, I think the « official agenda » part of the meeting would have been a better experience online than onsite:
> >
> >
> > - the chat is not available on the mobile site for meetecho and lots of discussions occur there. « Oh it is discussed in the chat » is frustrating when you are in the room.
> >
> >
> > Before all of this many of us used a jabber client to be talking during
> > the session.  You can always use whatever system you have with a jabber
> > client/server and go to jabber.ietf.org.
> >
> > And I used a separate jabber client (pidgin), so I was one of many that
> > were logged in twice.
> >
> >
> > - often we couldn’t see the face of people talking remotely
> >
> >
> > - in many WG meetings, I had the impression to attend reporting that could have been an email while actual technical discussions on items of the WG were pushed to the mailing list for the sake of a lack of time.
> >
> >
> > The last point might be the one that puzzles me the most. What is the point meeting in person to push discussions on online tools ? And why do we need to have WG activity reporting as slides rather than an email ?
> >
> > My 2 cents,
> >
> > ------------------------------
> >
> > Antoine FRESSANCOURT
> > Email: [e-mail]
> >
> > *From: *Leif Johansson<[e-mail]>
> > *To: *113attendees<[e-mail]>
> > *Subject: *[113attendees] hybrid meetings: the worst of both worlds
> > *Time: *2022-03-25 14:36:43
> >
> >
> > 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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> > [e-mail]
> > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/113attendees
> >
> >
> > --
> > Robert Moskowitz
> > Owner
> > HTT Consulting
> > C:      248-219-2059
> > F:      248-968-2824
> > E:      [e-mail]
> >
> > There's no limit to what can be accomplished if it doesn't matter who gets
> > the credit
> > --
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> > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/113attendees
> >

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