Ben Edelman 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.
Ben, you describe two filters in your message. First is the person
choosing which remarks get addressed by the ICANN board. The second is the
way the remarks are summarized. Both of these filters are worrisome.
In meatspace, people line up behind a microphone and take their turn one
after the next. There is no filter. Some speakers are cogent and get
right to the poinht; some rant; some hesitate. Some (but usually few)
repeat comments made earlier, in order to emphasize support for a
particular view.
Appropriate first tier filters would be:
a) deferring off-topic comments
b) acknowledgikng one comment per individual per topic
c) curtailing long responses beyond 250 words.
These "filters" map to the physical world. A chair may tell a commenter
that his/her words are off topic; may only allow one time at the mike per
person, and may use the timer to abruptly terminate the comments of a
long-winded speaker.
If people know these criteria, posted on the place where they can make
their submission, remote participants are more likely to think before they
write. We have ample evidence on this list that a few people are too glib
and waste bandwidth on inanities.
You haven't explained how online comments will be interspersed with the
physical ones, but I believe some time each ten minutes should be reserved
to bring the remote comments into the discussion. That will inject them
into the current flow of the forum.
I thought the mix of remote participation and physical participation at the
Names Council meeting on June 25 worked fairly well, with a large screen at
the front of the room. The pNC checked the screen occasionally, but
haphazardly. Fairness dictates building those checks into the physical
agenda every ten or fifteen minutes.
I wonder whether ICANN has explored tasking different board members with
bringing the remote discussion into the room. By this I mean, each hour, a
different board member is assigned the job of reciting a few online
comments every few minutes. The advantage of asking board members to do
this is that it assures they will each be engaged, if briefly, by the
remote participation. And reciting puts the comment into the Real Audio
record.
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