Greg wrote:
> Perhaps, as a compromise, the Santiago conference can run as planned,
> but those who attend (if connectivity permits) can use their computers
> to interact with the online community.
First of all, I want to note that the Berkman Center may not necessarily be
involved with the Santiago meeting. ICANN hasn't yet asked us to provide
technical meeting support there, and there may be scheduling issues also
with some key staff. That said, the issues you raise are legitimate no
matter who is running the meeting tech, so I'll proceed with general
thoughts re your suggestions.
An in-room real-time chat is something we've considered in the past and have
been hesitant about for a couple reasons. In particular, one high priority
of all our tech equipment is to avoid being unnecessarily distracting to the
actual substantive work being done. So we adopt technology that seems more
helpful than intrusive, and we stay away from anything that we're afraid
will make concentrating on the work at hand more difficult. I don't know
about the rest of you, but I'd have a lot of trouble listening to a speaker
while trying to participate in a fast-paced real-time chat session. I'm not
sure I want to ask anyone to do that -- and if we make that kind of chat
available to anyone, I'm afraid many will feel obliged to participate in (or
at least watch) the chat, thereby weakening the oral discussion.
That an in-room computer-based real-time chat would be too distracting is
indeed my primary concern. But there are others: The logistical nightmare
of providing AC and ethernet to as many as a couple hundred users. (Now we
know why the IETF uses wireless ethernet -- which I suppose would be
possible too at some cost.) Tech support for those users who have trouble,
though perhaps peer support would be sufficient. The need or "peer
pressure" for meeting attendees to bring computers -- perhaps a significant
burden on some (especially "locals," while those of us who tend to fly
around the world presumably have access to lots of computing power).
Call me old-fashioned, I think there's still something nice about an oral
discussion -- back-and-forth questions and answers of the sort you hear for
about half of each ICANN Open Meeting. I think of the tech as more of a
support to the room meeting rather than a replacement for it. So, for
example, I'm a big fan of real-time scribing -- it keeps the discussion
focused, I've found, in addition to making the event easier to follow for
non-native English speakers. But I'm concerned that a real-time chat
involving in-room participants might just take too much of the assembled
brainpower to take place in parallel with the current style of open
meetings.
> Would the Berkman center
> consider using something like ichat, or perhaps open up the news site
> to be writable for the duration of the conference?
We could certainly do either. But realize that, assuming the open meetings
maintain more or less the same format as has been the case in Singapore and
Berlin, there's limited time for recognizing remote comments. In an eight
hour meeting, there's perhaps 3 to 4 hours of Q&A. At best remote comments
could get maybe a third of that, say ninety minutes to be generous. How
long does it take to read a comment and respond? For some of the shorter
comments that we got initially, maybe a minute each. Recognizing ninety
remote comments in the course of the day would be great, I think. But then
comments got both more lengthy and more numerous at the same time. (Average
length of comments on the first day was 210 characters, then 394 on the
second day, rising to 476 for the last forty or so messages.) They were
good comments, mind you, but our architecture just wasn't setup to receive
them that way -- reading a couple hundred words out loud is really very
different than a couple sentences in terms of time requirements, meeting
norms, etc. I know these issues are important, and I know also that there
was some disappointment among remote participants that remote comments
weren't being recognized more frequently. But to send *more* and *longer*
comments in response actually only made the problem worse -- put us deeper
into a bigger hole, so to speak.
So my concern about a real-time chat taking place parallel to the meeting is
that it would surely generate huge volumes of comments -- too much for the
board and assembled group to read and discuss in the space of a day so
packed with agenda items each more important than the last. If there were
to be a simultaneous online chat, I think the expectation would have to be
that chat messages are not presented to the board, while there would remain
a separate interface for submitting messages more equivalent to coming to
the microphone and taking for thirty seconds or a minute.
What do people think of a separate real-time chat, presumably read that
evening or the next day by everyone interested including the board? Or a
separate threaded messaging system (yes, potentially hosted on our NNTP
server) other than the real-time comment submission system? If the
real-time chat is to be integrated with the meeting, how do you propose we
do so given the constraints of the length of the meeting, limited computer
availability, etc.?
Ben Edelman
