Re: mic lines not working as well as they used to...

[Chris Inacio <[e-mail]>]

I don’t have anything constructive for Stephen’s first point (fewer mic participants), but on his second point:
 
My experience is that WGs that bend the rules a bit work best – but this is to the detriment of remote participants, IMO.  When the chair allowed back and forth to happen between the presenter and possibly multiple parties at the mic, I thought the best discussion happened – but this disadvantaged the remote participants slightly.  After a back-and-forth, normal orderly meet echo queueing was followed.  What I haven’t seen work as well (although I have seen it work some) is back-and-forth with a remote participant involved.  (But maybe Barnes was a chair but participating as an individual contributor in that interaction…)
 
Stephen, what I understood you to express was that discussion of a topic/issue/idea is stunted because the lack of organic back-and-forth at the mic.  (Your second point.) If you meant something different or more, please correct my understanding.
 
Chris
 
From: WGChairs <[e-mail]> on behalf of Aaron Parecki <aaron=[e-mail]>
Date: Wednesday, November 23, 2022 at 10:21 AM
To: Working Group Chairs <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: mic lines not working as well as they used to...

As an in-person participant, I found it quite straightforward to add myself to the queue with meetecho lite, and I appreciate the unified in-room and virtual queue. I would not want to change that. I also appreciated being able to remain seated until I was called up.

 

As a new chair, I appreciated having participants' names visible so that I can more quickly learn names of people in the group.

 

If anything, what's missing is a way to highlight on the screen the name of the person speaking at the microphone, similar to how you can always see the name of the remote person speaking. (In practice, I noticed a mix of people/chairs removing the person from the queue when they got to the mic, so their name was no longer visible while speaking.)

 

Aaron

 


 

 
On Wed, Nov 23, 2022 at 7:08 AM Joel Halpern <[e-mail]> wrote:


I don't think we can stop requiring the use of the queue, as otherwise 
including remote participants becomes very difficult.

Having said that, maybe there are other changes that can be made to 
address the important issue that we do want discussion of topics at the 
mike.  That is generally why we are having the meeting sessions.

At one point, the plenary used a dual-queue approach where comments on 
the current topic could come forward before folks who wanted to raise 
another issue.  I don't know quite how to represent that with the 
tooling, or how to make it timely enough to be effective, but I wonder 
if something like that could be helpful?

Yours,

Joel

On 11/23/2022 10:02 AM, Stephen Farrell wrote:
>
> Hiya,
>
> I think we're making a bit of a mistake in requiring people
> who are in the room at meetings to join the meetecho queue
> before they join the physical mic line. It's not an end of
> the world thing, but I think it is a bit damaging.
>
> The results of what we've done this year seem to me to be
> that:
>
> - fewer people join mic lines overall
> - there's almost no real discussion of topics raised
>   at the mic as there used be
>
> I realise that being fair to remote participants needs to
> be a hard requirement, but I think we've gone a bit too far
> and ought back off some, e.g. to where we encourage but
> don't require people (whether remote or in-person) to join
> the meetecho queue. I think we ought also encourage more
> discussion at the mic (for both remote and in-person folks)
> and not be so fixated on the order in which people appeared
> in the meetecho queue. That requires a bit more chairing
> but that's why we're supposedly at the front of the room.
>
> But, maybe others like the current rigid setup or haven't
> found the lack of mic-line discussion a problem?
>
> Cheers,
> S.