Re: [Manycouches] ways to slow list traffic down --- Re: [Add] Slowing the list traffic down a bit: listening more and saying less

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

Sent from my iPhone

> On Aug 29, 2019, at 10:19 AM, Wes Hardaker <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Keith Moore <[e-mail]> writes:
> 
>>> On 8/28/19 7:38 PM, Wes Hardaker wrote:
>>> 
>>> I had mentioned in our couch-round discussion I think that I wanted
>>> create a virtual "mic line" using recorded videos/presentations where
>>> anyone that wanted to respond to others would functionally get 2 spots a
>>> day in line,
>> 
>> Maybe a bad analogy?   IMO the mic line has killed more productive
>> discussion than any single other change to IETF from early days, even
>> more than PowerPoint if that's possible.
> 
> Well, that may be the case but it's the closest analogy we have.  I like
> *threaded* mail readers (and don't see how anyone reads IETF mail
> without thread trees), and well written/described/thought-out
> conversations.  I think I'm trying to combine the benefits of both mic
> lines and threaded email.  

I use threaded email only rarely.  More often than not I find that it gets in the way more than it helps, because people don’t reply in neat little threads and the things people said in other threads are still relevant to the conversation.  If I’m reading only one thread in a conversation I feel like I’m missing important context.

I find mic lines an abomination, or at best a necessary evil.  I accept that either with a large number of participants, or when trying to accommodate remote participants, there needs to be some discipline to keep a few people from grabbing all of the bandwidth.  But mandatory mic lines killed the ability to quickly find solutions to tricky problems that rapid face to face interaction once facilitated.  

The meta point is : let’s not presume that the mechanisms we currently use are inherently good ones just because we’re accustomed to them.  

> I agree that too much formalism (eg
> powerpoints) can get in the way, but so can too little.

Formalism isn’t the worst problem with PowerPoint.  The worst problem with powers is that it often kills discussion - it encourages people to think that their role is to be a passive audience rather than active participants.  A related problem is that PowerPoint severely limits the amount of information that can be conveyed in an image, such that you sometimes need several PowerPoint slides (and several minutes per slide) to convey a single idea.   Writing on transparent sheets of plastic that were optically projected was actually much more effective , and you could annotate such slides in real time.  Another issue with PowerPoint is that speakers feel like they need to sync what they’re saying to what’s on the screen at the time (often doing little more than reading the words on the screen).  This is backwards- the speaker should be interacting with the audience, and adapting what he/she says as needed.  The visuals should be flexibly supporting the speaker, rather than the speaker following a predetermined script.  It’s supposed to be a discussion, not a performance.   And finally with PowerPoint there’s a presumption that everything said should be in the slides, which again stymies interaction and hinders resolution of issues more than facilitating it.

Keith