Re: Remote only meetings? [Re: Concerns about Singapore]

[Theodore V Faber <[e-mail]>]

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On 4/12/16 09:15, Joel M. Halpern wrote:
> Ted, you missed my point.  Yes, I can arrange a call with the
> relevant people.  And I frequently do. It is harder, but that would
> be acceptable.
> 
> The important part is that such calls are MUCH less effective than
>  face-to-face discussions.  There are lots of well-known reasons
> for this.
> 
> And no, inc ase it was not obvious, without the face-to-face
> meeting, there is no way to arrange such face-to-face meetings.

If the goal of the IETF is to replicate the experience of an IETF
meeting using telepresence tools, that is an impossible task.
Telepresence is not being present.

To my mind, the question is if a large scale use of telepresence tools
can create a working environment that the IETF membership can use to
advance the IETF's goals.  I'm curious enough about that question to
support an assessment of how expensive and difficult it would be to
replace one IETF meeting with a large scale telepresence experiment.

I think we should evaluate that experiment (should it occur) based on
whether or not the broader goals advance (standards and documents
advance, new ideas are sparked, the membership is appropriately
updated), not how they are advanced (discussions at the Scotch BOF,
plenary and BA, speaking at the mic in WG meetings).

I seems to me that a successful experiment would mean that we use more
large scale telepresence.  It may someday turn out that such events
replace some IETF meetings; it may not.  I don't know of any
organizations of the scale of the IETF that have historically relied
on face to face meetings and transitioned solely to large scale
telepresence, so my expectation is that IETF meetings will continue.

(Just to forestall the question: Anonymous seems to run entirely on
large scale telepresence (for some definition thereof).  It's got a
whole set of procedures and traditions that enable that.  It's a
fascinating situation, but I see little inspiration or intuition for
changing IETF procedures from it.)

> 
> Yes, we should work to make remote participation more effective.
> Doing away with the face-to-face meetings reminds me of the old SF
> story of the ballet dancers who were forced to dance wearing extra
> weights, to be "fair" to the less talented dancers.

Paging Harrison Bergeron.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

- -- 
Ted Faber <[e-mail]>
Engineering Specialist
Computer Systems Research Department
310-336-7373
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