Subject: [vmeet] A caution to chairs re. Etherpad

From: "Martin J. Dürst" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:32:49 +0900

Just a little caution for future meetings re. Etherpad.

What happended in the IRI WG meeting was that we had a very busy chair, 
who was looking at Etherpad and saw that somebody had started to type a 
line or two, and thus said "oh, great, I see we have a minute taker" and 
went on.

It turned out that this was me who wanted to help out as much as 
possible, but I was up for talking about the first two documents and so 
wasn't able to actually scribe. I realized the problem a few minutes 
into the meeting, and the chair said he'd reconstruct minutes from the 
audio.

Conclusion: Collaborative minute taking is great, but still make sure 
that there is somebody who is committed and able to take actual minutes.

Regards,   Martin.

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From: Tony Hansen <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2012 11:41:21 -0400

Even as a local participant, I found the etherpad scrolling issue 
annoying as well.

Another annoying issue is that the current implementation doesn't have 
the horsepower to handle large numbers of people looking at it 
simultaneously.

     Tony Hansen

On 3/31/2012 8:57 AM, John C Klensin wrote:
> Let me add two things from the perspective of the remote
> participant.
>
> 	- I had to manually scroll the window after every lines
> 	that were typed at the meeting.   Attempts to work
> 	around that by having the minute taker insert a "this is
> 	the bottom line" (or equivalent) line and then type
> 	above it didn't help consistently.   Minor annoyance if
> 	one is trying to track only the Etherpad but, if one
> 	needs to also track a Jabber room while paging through a
> 	slide deck, the behavior becomes enough of a problem to
> 	make remote viewing of the Etherpad much less useful.

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From: Stephen Farrell <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2012 16:46:53 +0100

I mailed tools-discuss to suggest they setup a readonly version
of the etherpad content on a webpage, same as we have for the
jabber logs. So, its on their list of suggestions received for
nice-to-have things. No idea how easy/hard that might be.

S

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2012 12:16:20 -0400

--On Monday, April 02, 2012 11:41 -0400 Tony Hansen
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> Even as a local participant, I found the etherpad scrolling
> issue annoying as well.
> 
> Another annoying issue is that the current implementation
> doesn't have the horsepower to handle large numbers of people
> looking at it simultaneously.

That hadn't occurred to me as a cause, but it might explain
several of the problems I was encountering.  It might be that
Etherpad, at least at present, is fine for a handful of people
working on minutes but that we should go back to Jabber to help
in-room and remote folks follow the meeting ... at least until
Etherpad can be improved somewhat and made hugely more robust.

    john

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From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2012 12:16:53 -0400

john