RE: IETF support for remote participation/virtual meetings

["Bernard Aboba" <bernard_aboba at hotmail.com>]

Peter St. Andre said:

"This is consistent with my experience: the chatroom serves as a way to
take notes for the minutes, funnel questions from remote participants
into the IRL meeting room, and follow other concurrent sessions. XMPP
groupchat is far from a perfect collaboration tool (and I say that as
the person who wrote the spec!), but IMHO it serves several quite useful
functions."

I have noticed that scribing is more difficult in Virtual Interim meetings.
Since people are on a teleconference bridge, it typically isn't necessary for a scribe
to relay questions from jabber to the bridge.  So sometimes it is hard to
find someone who wants to scribe.  However, it is still really
useful to have a real-time minute taker, and since jabber.ietf.org
auto-archives, doing the scribing in the jabber room  both helps with minutes
as well as enabling people to continue to follow the conversation if there
are problems with the bridge (not that uncommon).  In several virtual interims
I've seen the jabber room used to help debug issues with the other facilities
(web conferencing, bridge, etc.).