Re: Presentation vs. Discussion sessions (was: PowerPoint considered harmful)

[Randall Gellens <[e-mail]>]

At 1:37 PM -0500 12/2/12, Keith Moore wrote:

>  On 12/02/2012 01:06 PM, Melinda Shore wrote:
>>  There's a whole nexus of connected issues here, I think, and what
>>  a given person complains about depends on that person's pet peeves.
>>  It seems to me that if we were better about moving work forward
>>  between meetings (<- peeve!) meeting time wouldn't be chewed up
>>  with presenting the current state of the work.
>  While I fully agree that most WGs could be better at moving work 
> forward between meetings, I don't think it would solve the problem 
> of face to face meeting time being filled up with presentations.
>
>  I suspect that most WG participants have difficulty keeping up with 
> the traffic on their WGs' mailing lists for various reasons (too 
> much "distraction" from normal work, the sad state of mail user 
> agents, etc.). By forcing people to travel away from work, 
> face-to-face meetings serve as useful interruptions from normal 
> distractions and opportunities to catch up on IETF work.  If 
> working groups moved forward even faster than they do now, that 
> might actually be seen to increase the need for presentations at 
> face-to-face meetings.
>
>  Occasionally I've wondered if IETF meetings should have 
> "presentation" sessions separate from (and in advance of) "working" 
> sessions.    The difference between the two types of session would 
> be clearly indicated in the schedule.   The presentation sessions 
> would be geared toward presenting an overview of current state of 
> the proposals, including a summary of recent changes.   Perhaps 
> participants would be allowed to ask questions for clarification, 
> but discussion should be discouraged and any kind of polling of the 
> room or other decision making would be forbidden.  The presentation 
> meetings would therefore be optional for those who had kept up on 
> the mailing list.   And presentations would be forbidden in 
> discussion sessions.
>
>  I can imagine these being useful in several ways, e.g. in 
> facilitating better cross-group and cross-area review.   People who 
> were active participants in working groups could attend 
> presentation sessions of other groups, without sacrificing their 
> attendance in the discussion sessions of the groups in which they 
> were active.
>
>  Perhaps roughly the first 2(?) days of an IETF meeting could be 
> largely devoted to presentation sessions, and the remainder of the 
> time to discussion sessions.    Having a strict allocation of time 
> for each kind of session isn't so important as having the 
> presentation sessions for a particular group well in advance of the 
> discussion session for that group.
>
>  This is something that could be tried on a small scale, by a few 
> working groups (say one in each area) before being widely adopted. 
> It might help, however, to have explicit support for the idea in 
> the tools that maintain and display the meeting schedules.

My initial reaction was "No!" with a gut reaction that it would 
worsen the problems we have, but the more I've thought about this, 
the more I like it.  I've now come around to thinking this could be a 
really good idea.  Instead of fighting to hold back the tide, we 
accept it and figure out how to deal with it.  Yes, let's try it.

-- 
Randall Gellens
Opinions are personal;    facts are suspect;    I speak for myself only
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There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way
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