Re: [Tools-discuss] The future of "Interim" meetings

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 2020-04-15, at 16:58, Michael Richardson <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> 
>> If we're going to continue or increase us of virtual WG/RG(/side)
>> meetings for some time, then conflict management or some form of
>> planning coordination would become more crucial.
> 
> Yes, I agree.
> 
> In addition, some increase in social pressure on the chairs to get all the
> meeting information into the agenda that's on the DT is important.
> 
> Chairs are getting better, but some still don't seem to get it.
> There was talk about an agenda builder interface, which I thought was
> excessive hand-holding before, but I now think may be worthwhile.

I’m not a WG chair, but even as an RG chair I think I need to bite the bullet at some point and do a command-line tool for agenda updates.

(I’m still looking for the magic sauce for these to influence the /upcoming.ics .)

> Some other things that we could benefit from:
> 
> 1) incorporate doodle, or doodle-like functionality
>   (in particular, having it integrate against my calendar is key to being
>   able to answer well.  Having Doodle reserve slots in my calendar until the
>   decision is made is also really useful to help me avoid double bookings)

Yes, please.

> 2) calendar entries that one can subscribe to/be-invited to, such that WG chairs can know
>   who is coming, and who is going to be absent.  It may be better to defer
>   some conversations (especially if it's only two weeks to the next virtual
>   interim), than try to have a conversation without key people present.

We chairs already get the Webex .ics accepts/declines; maybe some automation in handling these would help.

> 3) webex is inadequate for our needs as is.
>   - We need slides delivered in PDF to the viewers, that can contain clickable
>   links, that can be advanced by the speaker, but which do not depend upon
>   the speaker's computer to provide.

Ha.  Look up BigBlueButton.  (Not sure about clickable links from the slides, though.)
The whiteboard feature (the speaker can draw on the slides, and if they want, everybody can) is something we haven’t had in the IETF since the 1990s.

There even is a mood feature that probably could be extended into a humming mode.

>   - better support for local audio problem debug

Look up BigBlueButton, once more.  You can’t enter a conference (as a potential speaker — there also is a listen-only mode) without doing a quick audio test.  Amazing time saver.  

The FreeSWITCH inside BigBlueButton can even do IPv6, IIUC.

Bigbluebutton is built to integrate with a user database, so we’d get our blue sheets automatically as well (at the expense of everybody needing a datatracker account, which is probably bearable).

Grüße, Carsten