Subject: RE: movies vs chat logs

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2003 09:28:20 -0600

I THINK this is the right e-mail to follow up to...

1. I know I found the JABBER logs for TRIGTRAN to be very useful 
in vetting our minutes (what did we MISS, who really said that, what 
was that person's last name - can't count on this last, but it's 
another pair of eyes in a relatively small community).

2. I've been taking minutes at every session I attend for the
last two or three IETFs, and they've tended to be "he said/she said"
in nature. I've usually gotten thank-yous from working group chairs for
this form of minutes, and I've gotten what-was-the-points from several
other readers. I'm thinking working group chairs would benefit
a lot from video archives, and some readers probably would benefit
from transcripts, but even text transcripts for a five-day, six-or-so-track
meeting aren't THAT easy to blast through - digesting the blow-by-blow
is still the most important ingredient, and the hardest to farm out...

Spencer

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Theodore Ts'o [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Friday, February 14, 2003 8:47 AM
> To: Randy Bush
> Cc: Marshall Rose; [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: movies vs chat logs
> 
> 
> On Thu, Feb 13, 2003 at 10:33:58PM -0800, Randy Bush wrote:
> > 
> > i have used jabber in ietf meetings and similarcontexts.  it works
> > to coordinate stuff in real-time.  but that was not my application
> > this time.  i really was after the as much content of the meeting
> > as possible.  to do that well in jabber or whatever, one would have
> > to pay a court transcription person.  whereas, as someone already
> > pointed out, a cheap video camera does the job.
> 
> On the other hand, it's much faster and convenient to scan (and
> search) a text transcript compared to viewing a video feed.  It also
> takes up less space to store.  It's extremely amusing to think of a
> scribe as a compression algorithm, but that's basically what's going
> on.  Unfortunately, as always, compression can sometimes be expensive.
> 
> In some cases we might be able to get cheap grad students.  Or perhaps
> we could find people who would be willing to transcribe 2 or 3 wg
> sessions that they aren't otherwise participating in exchange for a
> deep discount on their registration fee?  There would need to be some
> quality control (maybe the wg chair has to certify afterwards that the
> transcript was an accurate record of the proceedings), but it would
> help make much better minutes.
> 
> Of course, there are some downsides to having a non-participant scribe
> or take minutes for a meeting.  Someone who is familiar with the
> background, context, and (unfortunately, sometimes) jargon of a
> working group can often take better minutes than an outsider.  On the
> other hand, it is very hard to take good minutes and/or scribe while
> participating in the discussion, and often the minutes will suffer for
> those portions of the meeting where the minute-taker also wants to
> join into the discussion.  (Or stand in line at the mike, etc.)
> 
> That being said, though, I think that if the scribe was comprehensive
> enough, and the text was then immediately reviewed by the wg chairs
> and other core participants in the meeting, while the discusions was
> still fresh in their minds, the result might be a much *better* record
> of what happened than the current system of taking minutes for the
> meeting.
> 
> 						- Ted
> 
> 
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---

From: Tony Hansen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Feb 2003 21:48:18 -0500

In a couple of WGs, the person taking notes did so live on the jabber 
channel. A number of times there were corrections made in real time to 
the notes by the other participants. There were also a few cases where 
the note taker would put out a question about something that had just 
happened or been said, and gotten immediate info about his/her question. 
It was also useful when a side conversation occurred and you needed to 
catch back up with what the mike speaker had said.

	Tony Hansen
	[email-masked]