Subject: Re: Presentation vs. Discussion sessions (was: PowerPoint considered harmful)

From: Abdussalam Baryun <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2012 13:45:49 +0000

Hi Keith,

I hope that participant that travel to the f2f meeting and attend sessions,
do participate while they are there on the discussion lists of IETF WGs,
yes they attend and discuss which is reflected in the minutes report
document, but still there are some time they spend away from their work
which can be used for progress of our work. We are recommended to discuss
on the lists for the IETF work progress. Why don't the f2f participants
review all their interested WG drafts while they are in the 3 days for the
IETF and give their feedback on the list (within these important days).

If all participants attend remotely and physically in 2 hours per WG, why
not discuss on the list for 3 days or 12 hours interaction (if each
participant spends 4 hours on the list per day per WG).

 Still we need more encouragment to attract participants to review and
comment on the list or by an informational I-D.

AB

On 12/02/2012 01:06 PM, Melinda Shore wrote:

There's a whole nexus of connected issues here, I think, and what
a given person complains about depends on that person's pet peeves.
It seems to me that if we were better about moving work forward
between meetings (<- peeve!) meeting time wouldn't be chewed up
with presenting the current state of the work.

While I fully agree that most WGs could be better at moving work
forward between
meetings, I don't think it would solve the problem of face to face meeting
time being filled up with presentations.

I suspect that most WG participants have difficulty keeping up with the traffic
on their WGs' mailing lists for various reasons (too much "distraction"
from normal work, the sad state of mail user agents, etc.). By forcing
people to travel away from work, face-to-face meetings serve as useful
interruptions from normal distractions and opportunities to catch up on
IETF work. If working groups moved forward even faster than they do now,
that might actually be seen to increase the need for presentations at
face-to-face meetings.

Occasionally I've wondered if IETF meetings should have "presentation" sessions
separate from (and in advance of) "working" sessions. The difference
between the two types of session would be clearly indicated in the
schedule. The presentation sessions would be geared toward presenting an
overview of current state of the proposals, including a summary of recent
changes. Perhaps participants would be allowed to ask questions for
clarification, but discussion should be discouraged and any kind of polling
of the room or other decision making would be forbidden. The presentation
meetings would therefore be optional for those who had kept up on the
mailing list. And presentations would be forbidden in discussion sessions.

I can imagine these being useful in several ways, e.g. in facilitating better
cross-group and cross-area review. People who were active participants in
working groups could attend presentation sessions of other groups, without
sacrificing their attendance in the discussion sessions of the groups in
which they were active.

Perhaps roughly the first 2(?) days of an IETF meeting could be largely devoted
to presentation sessions, and the remainder of the time to discussion
sessions. Having a strict allocation of time for each kind of session isn't
so important as having the presentation sessions for a particular group
well in advance of the discussion session for that group.

This is something that could be tried on a small scale, by a few working groups
(say one in each area) before being widely adopted. It might help, however,
to have explicit support for the idea in the tools that maintain and
display the meeting schedules.

Keith