Re: WG meeting structure

["Pete Resnick" <[e-mail]>]

On 15 May 2019, at 9:14, STARK, BARBARA H wrote:

> Maybe the experiment should be to have a small room with a table/U 
> where only active list-participants are allowed. Stream the Meetecho 
> from this to a large room, which now becomes a remote site. There can 
> be a mic in the large room for people who want to talk to the small 
> room. And a moderator/jabber scribe in the large room (who don't need 
> to be a chair or active participant) to manage the large room mic and 
> identify who is at the mic.

I'm fine with this idea. I would be OK with some "cheap seats" in the 
small room if people wanted to sit in, as it will give us some 
additional data to the experiment.

I think as Michael has mentioned, quite a bit of the discussion has lost 
track of why we might want to do this: We want discussion, not "a 
serialized set of independent one way comments". (Thanks Ole.) Too 
often, that's what mic queues turn into, and that makes it harder for 
the chair to  figure out what the consensus is. People facing each other 
helps in a way that even tables all facing front do not. (See 
contortions in the current setup.) Having the chair face the remote 
screen to see who wants to participate helps. (Again, see contortions.)

The problem that remote (and some local observer) participants had with 
QUIC appears to be a chair issue: You still have to do discussion 
management, and in this setup the chair should call out the name of the 
person to ask them to speak, or even say, "John, Mary: Please go ahead 
and discuss between the two of you" and interrupt and say, "Joe, did you 
want to jump in?" Sure, that's not quite as free-flow as a free-for-all 
discussion, but it is much better than the current state. I also think 
that passing around a handheld mic would add a bit to the discussion 
management, instead of doing fixed "collect all sounds" mics. I've 
moderated sessions like this, and it does take attention and a piece of 
paper listing topics and names of people wishing to speak on those 
topics. No, you can't catch up on your email while chairing such a 
session. ;-)

My quick look over the list was a half a dozen folks thinking this is 
worth doing, a dozen seeing problems, and a couple simply neutrally 
commenting. Sounds like (given the small sample size) enough folks for 
an experiment, at least with their own WGs.

Speaking of experiments: For those of you with large rooms of folks (and 
do look at the numbers in the agenda request sent out yesterday; they're 
smaller than you think), it would be worth actually counting up how many 
people participated in your sessions (including presenters), how much 
time each of them spent speaking, and how quickly issues resolved. I 
suspect (with my data being a huge number of anecdotes) that you're 
being less productive in these sessions than you think you are.

pr
-- 
Pete Resnick http://www.episteme.net/
All connections to the world are tenuous at best