On Oct 30, 2010, at 4:01 AM, Glen Zorn wrote: >> The second biggest thing that IETF could do to raise productivity in >> meetings is to ban Internet use in meetings except for the purpose of >> remote participation. > > Harder to do & not clearly an improvement: it clear out meeting rooms a bit, > but on the other hand people who (for example) just read email in meetings > aren't really harming productivity too much.
I'm not sure about that. If you're in a room with ten people who are participating in a discussion, it's easy to know whether those ten have achieved consensus among themselves. Also, chances are good that each of those ten people has had a chance to ask questions, voice objections, or otherwise make contributions to the discussion. But if you're in a room with a hundred people (mostly staring at laptops) and only ten active participants, it's much harder to know whether there is consensus in the room. And because there are so many people not obviously doing anything, those who have something to say are more likely to feel inhibited. After all, most people are saying nothing (and not paying much attention), and we humans (okay, most of us) tend to take cues for what is socially acceptable by watching the behavior of those around us. In the early-to-mid 1990s, IETF WG meetings used to be good places to actually discuss concerns about a document, and hash out potential solutions. I remember several occasions when a WG would schedule two meeting sessions in a week, one on Monday and another on late Wednesday or Thursday. The Monday session would discuss the document(s) on the table, identify problems, suggest solutions. Then a couple of WG participants and the authors would sit up late one night and revise the document in time for review at the second meeting (or at least, to be able to report to the second meeting what changes they had made, and get feedback on those). I think it led to much faster convergence than what we usually see now. And often the face-to-face review/revise/review sessions resulted in getting the document in a state where there were only a few nits remaining. I don't think this would work the way we have meetings now, because there's nowhere nearly enough time for discussion. Keith _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
