Patrick Greenwell wrote:
> And herein lies the rub, and the disparity between on-line participants
> and those physically present.
>
> Those physically present can stand in line for a mike and say whatever it
> is they wish to say. Those not physically present are *filtered* through
> the staff.
I do realize that remote participants are disadvantaged in certain ways, and
my overall goal remains, as Ellen suggests it should be, to create parity
between physical and remote participation. But the two are just different
in certain ways. So, while so far the list has discussed the reasons why
remote participation seems inferior, I'd like to point out a few factors
that weigh in on the opposite side, i.e. ways in which it might be thought
to be "better" to be a remote participant than to attend physically.
* While remote comments may indeed be excerpted for oral presentation the
assembled group, realize that there's more to the presentation of remote
comments than the oral component. In particular, there are two big screens
in the front of the room on which comments will be displayed. If I'm doing
my job right, your comment is displayed on screen while it's being read (in
full or in part) or discussed by the remote participant liaison and the
presiding body (ICANN board, DNSO NC, whatever). For those of us who read
faster than we listen -- not to mention those who retain written material
better than that which we hear, and note that I understand this category to
include most non-Native English speakers -- having a comment displayed on
screen is a big advantage. Physical attendees have no such ability to
control the screen when they make remote comments; while I guess a physical
commentor could ask me to display a particular URL during his comment, and a
few have done so over the past few meetings, social norms & general desire
to avoid complexity discourage same, so physical participants have no
similarly-effective way to capture the power of the projection screen.
* Online participants get their comments put in the online archive in text
form -- searchable, presumably indexed by altavista & all, translatable by
babelfish and similar tools, and easily reviewed as needed by anyone with
even a basic Lynx-only web connection. Physical participants get their
comments put in the RealVideo, and since I understand that there's still no
money for transcriptions (if anyone wants to donate the $$$$, though, I
think it'd be great!...) and we have no (viable) Realvideo
indexing/searching tools, comments by physical meeting attendees are, if not
"lost" after the meeting, significantly harder to find on demand.
So, for at least these two reasons and maybe others I haven't thought about,
online commenters aren't "unambiguously worse off" than physical attendees.
(Translation: There are plusses and minuses to each, and only a particular
person's preferences among these tradeoffs determine which option is
"better.")
One more reason why I think reading complete remote comments outloud in
their entirety doesn't make sense: Since so many of us read faster than we
listen, it actually is somewhat "boring" to have a comment both displayed on
screen and read outloud. Several physical attendees told me as much after
the November meeting when we tended to read comments completely while also
displaying them on screen. I thought they had a good point, and their
concern fit well with another goal of mine, to generally keep the meetings
fast-paced (as much to move through a long agenda as to prevent boredom, of
course!).
Finally, I guess I just don't quite understand what you would all suggest
instead of excerpting and, in a major time crunch, summarizing. We're going
to have a lot of remote comments, I expect. Too many to read all of in
their entirety -- not enough hours in the meeting, and we certainly wouldn't
want to start speed-reading outloud (mumbling, slurring syllables, etc.)
which would surely hurt non-native speakers not to mention the simultaneous
translators. Ultimately, I'm not at all convinced that it would be "better"
(according to my own values, admittedly) to recognize forty remote comments
in the course of the day for a minute each than a hundred for 20 seconds
each, especially if we can properly capture the central point of each of the
hundred comments. In short, facing limited time, I prefer giving everyone a
little turn of remote participation, not of giving the first few in the
virtual line an exceptionally big turn.
All that said, I too don't like the idea of filtering comments. If we got a
reasonable number of short, clear, non-overlapping comments, I'd certainly
not be at all inclined to filter or excerpt in any way. To the extent that
each of you can help on this front -- keeping messages as short as possible,
rereading and editing messages to make them more clearly worded, not using
the realtime comment submission system as a realtime chat (rather using the
realtime chat for that purpose!) -- I encourage you to do so.
On the subject of whether 250 words is comparable to the expected time limit
imposed by the chair, several comments. In all honesty, I don't know. But
just as I think most ideas can be expressed orally in 2 minutes -- with
those with exceptionally "interesting" ideas surely granted additional time
by general consensus of all who want to hear more -- I think most ideas
likely to be sent via remote comments can be expressed in 250 words.
Looking over the Berlin comments, I do think that was the case for them, and
I'm honestly not all that worried about the limit. However, if it truly
turns out to be limiting, I'd be open to raising or eliminating the limit
midway through a session, though I really don't expect this to be necessary.
The timer, incidentally, is flexible in its duration -- I take my
instruction from the chair and set the clock to whatever length is
requested. It's been my experience in the past that most chairs are pretty
lenient towards those who don't speak English natively, giving them extra
time and allowance as needed, but that's admittedly just my personal
impression.
-Ben, happy to report that the equipment arrived in Santiago just fine and
is generally configured and ready for the upcoming webcasts
