Re: Interim meetings - changing the way we work

["Joel M. Halpern" <[e-mail]>]

I need to agree with John here.  There are several WGs I try to monitor 
that started having frequent interim conference calls.  There is no way 
I can reliably make time for that.  The advantage of email is that I can 
fit it in around the work I need to do (including reading it during 
corporate conference calls.)  In one case I have had to dramatically 
reduce my effective participation in the WG because most of the work 
moved to the conference calls.

One of the other standards bodies I have had to work with did all of its 
work in weekly conference calls.  This made it next to impossible for me 
to contribute to most of the topics, as I could not make most of the calls.

Yours,
Joel

On 2/26/15 9:53 AM, Ted Lemon wrote:
> On Feb 26, 2015, at 9:37 AM, John C Klensin <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> The more we shift
>> from doing almost all of our work on mailing lists to doing a
>> significant proportion of it in high-frequency interim meetings,
>> the more we tend to narrow effective participation to
>> vendor-supported people with dedicated time in convenient (for
>> the WG majority) time zones and reduce some of the diversity we
>> have claimed is important.
>
> Actually, my experience is the opposite: mailing lists are incredibly time consuming, because there are a few participants who feel the need to repeat themselves over and over again in any given discussion, and people aren't concise in their responses, nor considerate of the burden their responses will impose on readers, so there is a lot of reading, much of which is completely redundant.   Being restricted to the low shared bandwidth of voice in an online meeting substantially mitigates that, if the working group chair is doing a good job of disciplining the discussion.
>
> There is a reason why we do f2f meetings, and it's not because we like the cookies (although we do).
>
>