Re: Disappointing take-up of Gather.Town

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

--On Thursday, July 30, 2020 05:09 -0700 joel jaeggli
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> On 7/30/20 04:30, Adrian Farrel wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Am I the only one to miss random corridor conversations that
>> happen at face-to-face IETF meetings?
>> 
>> Of course, planned coffee-time meet-ups can still be
>> scheduled using a variety of meeting tools, but the casual
>> bumping in to people and talking about things, and (better
>> still) hooking into other people's conversations to learn and
>> share, is a real loss.
>> 
>> So I have been hanging around in Gather.Town
>> (https://ietf.gather.town/z6N2SDxHebMdDAfo/IETF-108) and
>> found this has worked quite nicely for exactly that reason.
>> Quick hellos, short chats, or longer rambling debates have
>> all been working nicely.
>> 
>> But where is everybody? The number of people in the
>> application seems to range between 20 and 50. 
>> 
>> Is the problem that Gather.Town makes you run all sorts of
>> scripts that might be a bit icky? Or are we all really just
>> antisocial?
> 
> Being in an inconvenient time zone this time has led to me for
> example being somewhat parsimonious with time, i suspect that
> others may have similar considerations. concurrency with
> timezone distributed communities is hard.

While my time zone is a few hours less inconvenient than Joel's,
one advantage of all-day meetings, especially f2f ones where
almost everyone is off-site relative to their normal locations
is that IETF (including informal conversations and small
meetings) becomes the almost exclusive focus of attention for
the week.  Cut that to about five hours, especially in a time
zone that leaves half the "normal" workday free, and monitoring
a group because something _might_ happen gets hard.  And, as
Christian pointed out, I will not have my mic and camera active
when I'm not paying very active attention to a particular
session/application (and, yeah, icky and possibly somewhat
unconstrained scripts are another part of that problem).  

It also looks like something whose controls, etc., would take
some getting used to and time this week (or last) to figure it
out is, umm, limited.  And, at least for me, the screen,
especially the very small black user name characters on a
striped dark brown background, is essentially unreadable, which
is another deterrent.

   john