Subject: Better non-meeting progress, was Re: [73attendees] Attendance by country

From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 6 Dec 2008 09:49:38 +0100

On the 73attendees list we had a discussion about making face-to-face  
meetings unnecessary through better technology.

In my opinion, that will be extremely hard to the point of being  
impossible, for various reasons. (See the 73attendees discussion for a  
bunch of them.) However, a more useful way forward would be to make  
remote participation work a whole lot better.

At one point we had multicast video for a couple of tracks, which  
didn't work very well. Now we have audo for all sessions, which works  
much better (although when the audio quality is bad it takes a lot of  
energy to listen and the lag makes reacting problematic). Jabber came  
along before we had audio everywhere, giving rise to the notion that  
someone should type in whatever happens in the meeting. I think that  
use of jabber is problematic, but using jabber as a back channel for  
additional discussion without interrupting the speaker only works on  
occasion because too few people participate in jabber, or participate  
in that way. And we don't use jabber anywhere in our process. I think  
there's an opportunity there once we figure out how to use it well.

But that's just the state of affairs today. Bandwidth and hardware are  
now cheap enough that we could revist video in the form of unicast  
streaming, although that may take more person hours. Or maybe we can  
create some other way to allow remote participants to see the slides  
"live". I assume there are solutions for this, although they may not  
be compatible with the quaint operating systems some participants  
choose to use. Maybe we can hack something together ourselves? Export  
slides to images or HTML, use some web magic to have the current one  
on a web page, a volunteer triggers advancing the slides?

Something that I'd like to see is a way for remote participants to  
talk back. I know a system that can do this called Talk Shoe exists  
that allows people to make home brew call in radio shows. If it works  
well enough, we could even do away with microphones in the meetings  
and people can just speak into their laptops.

However, making progress here probably requires more than just  
volunteer work. Would it make sense to charge a fee for remote  
participation? At first, the extra money could be used to improve the  
tools for this. If it them becomes popular it could become a new  
revenue stream for the IETF.
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