[vmeet] Best Practices

[Fred Baker <[e-mail]>]

On Apr 24, 2009, at 10:56 AM, Dave CROCKER wrote:

> Thomas Narten is lobbying for an effort to develop a document on  
> best practices... A BCP on this sounds like it would be useful.

I would agree. That said, I would want it to in fact be a BCP, in the  
sense of being the best practices known to currently be in use among  
people who use virtual meetings. That can be simple or complex, and we  
are a community that knows how to make simple things complex.

First, I would want it to be written and reviewed by a people that  
have used a variety of remote interaction tools and have no obvious  
grist to chew. I would also want the important assumptions written in  
the same memo as the "best practices". Assumptions include the  
attendants and style of the meeting; a meeting of a dozen people who  
know each other well and work well together is very different from a  
meeting with 200 people who are split into factions with fundamentally  
different models for whatever is under discussion. That showed up this  
morning, with some of us who had experience with WebEx, Marratech, and  
Adobe tools talking about smallish collaborations while others really  
wanted to discuss "how does this work with 200 people in a room and  
one lonely denizen dangling off the edge of the earth?"

Another thing that would probably help is to have someone, probably  
several someones, who attends IETF activities remotely and whose first  
language is not English, talking about what makes meetings more useful  
for him or her.

At this point, I don't know that we as a community know how best to  
use tools like these in our meetings. We have some idea, because we  
have used them in our day jobs, but we can't say we have tried them in  
situ and know what works and what doesn't.

Thinking about this, I started to suggest that folks send Thomas and I  
lists of their best suggestions toward such a note. But I suspect that  
the old adage that "tragic cases make bad law" applies here. What we  
really want is suggestions on how to make meetings work well, not "all  
the bad things to avoid". In general, that boils down to planning (get  
the dates sorted early), preparation (agenda out a week before, write  
and read documents in advance, if presentations are involved make/ 
distribute slides well in advance), and considerate behavior during  
meetings (assume the presence of folks for whom English is not a first  
language, etc). Oh, good tools too.