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

[Miles Fidelman <[e-mail]>]

On 4/12/16 1:33 PM, Theodore V Faber wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA512
>
> 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.)
>

I would think that a major open source project might be more of an 
example - perhaps Debian?

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra