Re: [73attendees] Attendance by country

I've done a lot of work on non-crappy technology.  It's pretty damn hard
to make it work. I claim, it doesn't work: large room environments
cannot be remoted successfully by any known technology regardless of
cost.

Small room remotes work, but it's expensive.  You can have 3-4 groups of
3-4 people and have a satisfactory experience.  $250K+ per room.  While
there isn't any real limit to adding more rooms, it's physically
difficult. 

Desktop remotes work, and you can make that work for many more people.
The quality of the experience is not as good as the room systems, but it
works in the absolute sense: you can get real work done, and you like
it.  You can make it work with the above systems, but it doesn't work
all that well for more than one person per room.

I'll say one more thing:
Lots of people have tried to do this.  It's not easy.  Every time you
start you think "there has to be an easy way to make this work, those
other guys are stupid".  Sorry.  It's very hard.  

We know a lot about what it takes.  We can describe pretty easily what
it takes.   Doing it is hard and/or expensive.

Brian

-----Original Message-----
From: Ted Lemon [mailto:mellon@fugue.com] 
Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2008 3:06 PM
To: Rosen, Brian
Cc: Scott Brim; 73attendees@ietf.org
Subject: Re: [73attendees] Attendance by country

On Dec 4, 2008, at 2:29 PM, Rosen, Brian wrote:
> If you think about it, you already know that.  Just thinking about
> regular conference bridges: everyone on the bridge works better than
> some people in a room and others on the bridge.  The in room people  
> get
> better interaction between themselves but worse interaction with  
> remote
> participants: worse than if everyone was on the bridge.  The remote
> participants get horrible experience with the mix.

This is just crappy technology.   Conference bridges exist because  
they are easy, not because they are the right solution.   Offsite  
participants ought to be able to speak questions into their laptop  
mics, and wg chairs ought to be able to queue those up in order  
against the people who are actually at the mics in the room.   When  
I'm taking minutes (for some reason I do that a lot), I'd like to be  
able to ask my own questions that way, rather than having to miss  
taking part of the minutes when I go up to the mic.

However, your larger point is probably true - if *everyone* were  
remote, then a lot of the technical issues of mixing remote and in- 
person participation would go away.   But I think the experience would  
be less satisfying even for the remote participants in that case,  
because the energy of in-person participation helps to drive the  
process in a way that purely remote participation would not.

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