--On Sunday, October 23, 2011 07:05 -0700 "Murray S. Kucherawy"
<m...@cloudmark.com> wrote:
>...
> Tough call. I completely understand the need and desire to be
> productive without requiring meetings, for all the financial,
> participation, and other reasons given. But I also am very
> familiar with the fact that getting work done on lists can be
> a real challenge: People get sidetracked and can take days,
> weeks, or even months to answer something that's holding up a
> working group.
>
> I suspect decisions get made in person because people show up,
> perhaps out of fear that they will have missed an opportunity
> to be heard or influence a key decision. There's a feeling
> that meetings produce action items, where in the list
> environment action items get assigned when consensus gets
> around to warranting it.
>
> If you're sitting on a mailing list and someone asks you to
> provide a document review by some date and you say nothing,
> there's no indication of whether or not you even got the
> request. If you're sitting in a meeting room and someone asks
> you to provide a document review by some date, that person is
> likely to get an answer from you right away.
>
> In short: Meetings don't stall, but lists do. And I think,
> therefore, that many people find the meetings important,
> perhaps enough so that they save all their WG energy for the
> meetings.
>
> I don't think it's best for maximum participation, especially
> given the costs of the meetings as per discussion in the other
> thread, but I understand why it is that way.
Murray, fwiw, your analysis doesn't require f2f meetings. If it
could be done, well-conducted virtual/remote meetings would work
as well because they, too involve fixed cutoffs, real-time
responses, and opportunity to confront those who may not be
responding, etc.
At the other extreme, of course, we could adopt the model used
by a few other standards bodies (and perhaps left over when
"mailing list" meant "distribution of documents by post"), stop
expecting anything at all from mailing lists, and hold week-long
(or longer) meetings that the WG level in which we expected all
of the work to get done :-(
john
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