On 23 August 1999, "Ben Edelman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>* 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.
>
Yes, but aren't these screens going to be positioned so that they are
facing the audience, and in effect, obscured from view by the BoD, or
whatever body is running the meeting? It's important to remember that
while comments made in these sessions are to a certain extent addressed
to the entire room, they are directed at the persons sitting in the
front of the room, facing the audience.
The benefit of display is lost on those people, because they have their
backs to the screen. They don't have the luxury of sitting and reading
silently while the messages are summariezed to them. This is a pity,
because they are the ones who must address the issues raised, and
interpretation as well as presentation are part and parcel of that
communicative effort.
>* 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.
>
This is nice, but the point many are trying to make (I believe) is that
the problem here is the immediacy of the comments, their integrity
during presentation to the panel/board/whathaveyou, and their psychological
weight as opposed to those who can afford to attend in person.
While it may be nice to have a written record of points raised and
questions asked, it becomes a bitter pill when one realizes they were
not addressed in the setting they were intended. I've never seen any
NC member, for example, go back to meeting archives and address points
raised by remote participants that were not dealt with, in whole or
in part, at the actual meeting.
>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.")
I think many could argue that the plusses of physical attendance --
namely, the increased difficulty of avoiding a question presented in
person, in toto, unadulterated, by the original questioner -- outweigh
any plusses gained from remote participation at this point in time.
>
>
>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!).
Again, the question isn't being asked for the benefit of the audience, whom
the screens face. It's being asked to obtain information, present
argumentation, and/or persuade the members of the group running the
discussion, who do not have the luxury of large screens in front of them
from which to read. Indeed, I believe you've mentioned previously that
providing this for them (at least in Esther's case) was more of a burden
than a hindrance. Since they cannot and/or will not read the unadulterated
remote submissions, it becomes even more crucial that the remote participants
have their voice heard as they intended, and not as interpreted by someone
who is not the ultimate target of the message. Interpretation is half
the communication process.
>
>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.
Is there data on this? At the June 26th NC meeting, there were only
a handful of comments, and plenty of time in which to deal with them.
The concerns of the stakeholders should not be ignored, put off,
folded, spindled, or mutilated because of time constraints. If there's
not enough time to adress the major concerns, then I suggest that the
schedule needs to be altered. If there's not enough time to reasonably
address the concerns even with altering the schedule, then I argue that
this further demonstrates that physical meetings are costly, wasteful,
and ineffective.
Without the ability to address substantive concerns of the stakeholders,
these meetings are just publicity ploys. Unless they were never intended
to be 'working meetings', and instead are just social events.
>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.
Will the number of people making the same point be read into the record?
If one person makes a point, that's one thing. If a hundred (as you
predict) all raise the same issue, the weight of numbers should be
firmly and clearly communicated to the body running the meeting. This
would be akin to the entire room rising up and demanding an answer to
a question. Yet, somehow, summarizing all of these into a few sentences
and having the summary read by a disinterested party loses this impact.
And this is a perfect example of the disparity between physical and
remote participation.
We're social animals, and we're designed to react to contextual cues
in expression, posture, tone of voice, volume, cadence, speed, idiom, etc.
All of this is taken away from the remote participants, and then further
distilled by the summarization process. It may sound trivial, but it's
not. There are valid, reporoducable psychological differences between
written and oral communication. These physical meetings that, by your
own admission, cannot possibly hope to address the issues brought forth
in them serve to provide a subtle but important advantage to those who
can afford to attend, while handicapping those who cannot.
>
>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.
>
This is not the first time the issue of summarization within a forum has
come up, and it won't be the last. However, except for cases where there
is a very, very, very distinct line to be found between signal and noise,
it has usually been thought wisest to avoid opening this particular
Pandora's box. And I think it can be safely argued that this instance
is not one where signal and noise are so clearly delineated by the whole,
let alone by one person.
>
>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.
But that limit can be adjusted as the speaker stands. There is no
such analogue for the word-limit on remote submissions. Remote
participants are forced into this limit, with no hope of reprieve.
--
Mark C. Langston LATEST: ICANN refuses Let your voice be heard:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] to consider application for http://www.idno.org
Systems Admin Constituency status from organized http://www.icann.org
San Jose, CA individual domain name owners http://www.dnso.org
