Re: Disappointing take-up of Gather.Town

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Thursday, July 30, 2020 16:07 -0500 Spencer Dawkins at IETF
<[e-mail]> wrote:

>...
> I am sympathetic to this, especially if we hope to involve
> people who can't participate in an IETF meeting for a week or
> two at a time (some smart people don't have time to do more
> than show up at three sessions that are interesting and/or
> relevant, much less a whole week, much less two whole weeks).
> 
> But I wonder if leaving Gather.Town up for (at a minimum) the
> week before and week after an IETF meeting week would allow
> people to do a better job of contacting people you want to
> talk to, especially if there is a way to say "I'm planning to
> talk to (perhaps include names, and other) people who are
> interested in aspects of immersive media on Tuesday, at this
> time, please feel free to stop by".
> 
> In Real Life, we do wander around in real hallways, but we
> also say "I'll meet you by the cookes during the break", and
> then people stop by to join in.
> 
> That might give people a better venue for actual "side
> meetings" than the pseudo-sessions with slides, minutes, and
> mike lines that people are using because that's the best venue
> they have available.

Spencer,

I think that would be a great idea but Gather.Town, at least as
now designed and implemented, wouldn't do it.  Even if I were
willing to have my camera and microphone controlled by an app
I'm running in background in case someone wants to reach out to
me, doing so would be incompatible with the many online meeting
I have a week.  

But it seems to me we might look for or think about an app by
which people could indicate they are willing to be pinged to
either come online or set up a time and which people could use
to selectively ping others or have the application pick a
handful of people to ping at random.   Some of that capability
is available in a typical Jabber (or proprietary IM) client
except that I (and I suppose others) are willing to hear from
people I don't know about IETF issues or contacts but not
strangers wanting to initiate for random chats to sell me, e.g.,
a better credit card or a new, guaranteed COVID-19-stopping,
mask (borrowing from recent phone spam).

best,
   john