Re: Feedback from IETF 120 Vancouver post-meeting survey

[Warren Kumari <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Sep 03, 2024 at 2:34 AM, Eliot Lear <[e-mail]> wrote:

> My point:
>
> It's better to have one meeting rather than two.  That is what the human
> brain is wired for.  When the chat really gets going, I will bet you that
> those people paying attention to the chat are missing at least some of what
> is being said at the microphone.  People fly great distances to participate
> in these meetings, and so paying attention to the meeting in the room is a
> matter of courtesy.
>


Yes, yes people do fly great distances to participate in these meetings —
and if they want to chat about draft-foo-bar because the current
presentation on draft-foo-baz is boring to them, I think that this is their
right. There are many many presentations in most WGs which are only of
interest to a very small number of participants - as you pointed out,
people travel to these meetings; they should be able to decide which
presentations / drafts are worth their time.

As someone with ADHD, I'm fairly much always looking for some distraction -
if you take away my chat, and phone and laptop to try and make me care
about draft-foo-baz, I'll simply start plaiting my shoelaces or something
:-)

And those of us who do often miss what is being written in the chats.  Ergo
> two meetings.
>
> That said, I'm not suggesting that there's no purpose for the chat
> interface, and as I and others wrote, a very chatty chat room is a signal
> to the chairs that a topic may need more discussion time.
>

It could be that — it could also be that the "current" presentation or
topic is just boring or out of scope.

Something that I think would be very valuable would be tutorials on how to
present effectively at an IETF meeting. I suspect that many potentially
useful and interesting ideas don't get traction because WG participants get
lost during presentations….

This wouldn't need to be particularly thorough or extensive -  for example,
I send the below when people ask for agenda time.
While these all seem obvious and clear, I've noticed that when I *don't*
sent this, the quality of presentations are worse.
--
1: Please rehearse your talk, make sure that it fits within the allocated
time slot, and that you have left some time for questions. It is impolite
to the audience to run over your allocated time, and we are likely to
simply cut you off if you do.

2: Please send over slides as soon as you have them (and at least 2 days
before the meeting)

3: Slides should be in PDF format, and check that things like emojis and
images rendered correctly.

4: Please name the files something like: <your_name>_<presentation_name>.
Exact format is not important, just something that will make it easy to
find when trying to figure out which one to present next.

5: Please put slide numbers on all slides.

6: Slides are a summary of what you want to say - please don’t just put
everything on the slides and read them verbatim (we all know how to read!)
--

W



>
> Eliot
>