On 11/12/12 6:08 AM, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > On 11/11/2012 18:06, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote: > ... ... snip ... > > There's no doubt that personal attendance is the best way to get a full > understanding of how the IETF works, but remote participation is > supposed to work.
I fully agree. However, I've found that the tools we use for remote participation in the IETF are, IMO, a bit archaic. Don't get me wrong, I fully support having Jabber rooms and audio streams, but, its really difficult to follow a meeting that way, but I've had much better remote participation experiences in other conferences than I've had with the IETF. Meetecho is a good starting point, but it's not available in most sessions and the quality of the video feed is very poor. It also suffers from reliability issues where people get dropped from the session. Having Meetecho available in most WG sessions would be a great bonus for remote participants. If this is not possible, I think we should consider having a registration mechanism for remote participants so the resources can be better managed. The key here is having the remote participants in mind, as a real constituency. So far this is not the case, they are almost an afterthought. Meetecho service can be improved including using real cameras (not webcams attached to a notebook's display) and providing adequate mounting points for the cameras, adequate lighting and marking the space where the speakers should stand in order to be better captured by the camera. Warm regards, ~Carlos