[vmeet] Suggestion

["Fred Baker (fred)" <[e-mail]>]

Lee and I chatted this morning, and he wondered aloud what it would take to virtualize IETF 100. Not to remove the f2f component, but to make remote participation work well enough that we can say remote participants are at least second class citizens, as opposed to being an oddball tacked on.

Part of this, and this is why I copied Mirja and Brian, needs to be a meaningful measure of quality of experience and response to it. At minimum, having people at each end of the conversation report something akin to a MOS score (thumbs up or down are obvious signals, or holding up some number of fingers to say how it went, or maybe having a web page that would allow someone to do the equivalent in a timestamped log) could give us some interesting information perhaps. Mirja and Brian can no doubt inform and refine those concepts. If we're having a congestion issue, for example, maybe we need to make it easy to make video content less active (limit it to slide projection as opposed to a human face, or change the codec, or have the human able to turn it off without losing audio, etc). If we have packet sequence numbers, maybe we want to capture realtime statistics on packet lose, delay variation, and so on.

Part of this also has to do with the chair's "cockpit". From Lee and my perspective chairing v6ops on Monday, life was pretty busy. My laptop was projecting slides, and I was interacting with speakers and people in the room. In the room we had a jabber scribe and someone taking notes on what is oddly called an Etherpad. Lee had jabber in a pane, the Etherpad on a pane, his own notes on a pane, and meetecho control on a separate laptop. I didn't actually bring it (intended to but managed to leave it in my room in an overflow hotel), but I usually have an iPad for my own notes. Add to that Lee being able to chase the blue sheets, interact with the A/V team, or otherwise run around the room, and - well, let's just say I'm glad I have a co-chair. It takes two. At this point, I'm wondering how to simplify all that. Not offering suggestions right now, but I think we need to think about that in the context of virtualizing meetings.