Re: Remote participation fees

[John Leslie <[e-mail]>]

   (I do generally try to avoid high Narten scores, but...)
 
John C Klensin <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>... but there is an issue that more and fancier protocols and/or
> hardware doesn't solve, which is that running these things well
> and at high quality tends to need serious operational commitments,
> which means more staff.

   There will be costs, but they _could_ be quite minimal:

> One can reduce the staff requirement somewhat with _really_ fancy
> and expensive technology, but the tradeoff may not be wonderful.
> I'm not talking about the complex technical stuff here, I'm talking
> about things closer to "camera gives good view of carpet" and
> "if that speaker is going to pace the floor while talking,
> either the camera needs to follow or someone needs to apply a
> short leash"

   These don't require on-site staff to notice, so probably these
could be _entirely_ covered by volunteers. Doing something about it
probably would require on-site staff -- but that's needed to make
the sound+picture useful to archive the session anyway...

> to say nothing of the perennial microphone announcement, "MY NAME
> IS <mumble>".

   That's really no worse for remote participants.

> Similarly, very high quality remote participation with lots of
> participants at lots of different locations tends to either put
> a premium on participant training and/or typing speed and/or a
> requirement for trained moderators who can control both in-room
> and remote conversation flow.  Again, not really technical
> issues, but not so easy to resolve, at least without cultural
> changes.

   Actually, there are many conferencing systems which already
have solutions to these problems. It's just a learning-curve
issue -- and so far we've avoided learning them.

>... Again, be careful what you wish for, lest trying to optimize
> for people attending face to face meetings while not requiring so
> much travel, bring a situation in which almost all of the people
> at a meeting in Region X are from Region X, almost all of those
> at a meeting in Region Y are from Region Y, etc.  That loss of
> diversity in individual f2f meetings, even if it improved
> statistical diversity over a year or two, would not, IMO, be a
> desirable outcome.

   +1

--
John Leslie <[e-mail]>