Re: in-person vs remote participation

Melinda Shore <melinda.shore@gmail.com> Mon, 12 November 2012 17:42 UTC

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Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2012 08:42:26 -0900
From: Melinda Shore <melinda.shore@gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: in-person vs remote participation
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On 11/12/12 8:32 AM, Riccardo Bernardini wrote:
> Let me add my own experience here, related to a different
> environment (scientific conferences), but also very similar to yours.
> Usually, if I go to a conference it is because I have a paper to
> present, but that it is not the only payback of being there.  There
> is the hall (or bar) talking with old colleagues of mine, there is
> the casual meeting of other researchers (old and young) working in my
> field with which I exchange experiences, point of view and maybe a
> new collaboration can be born.  Actually, I do not know how this
> could be replicated with an online tool.

Well, I think it's important to be clear that IETF meetings are working
meetings and they exist largely to progress documents, so the goals are
somewhat different.  I think that at this point I've done the remote
participation thing as much as anybody and from my perspective the main
problem is not the tools but that the quality of the experience varies
enormously with the attention/skill of the session chairs.  Some are
attentive to remote participants, some don't even bother to acknowledge
we exist.  There's a WG chairs wiki page on facilitating remote
participation at
http://wiki.tools.ietf.org/group/wgchairs/wiki/RemoteParticipation.

I've also had very good experiences using email to make the kind of
contacts you've mentioned - something comes up in a session and sending
out-of-band email directly to the person who said something interesting.

In-person participation brings with it benefits that remote
participation doesn't (and is mandatory for people in certain roles).
But the cost-benefit tradeoff?  I'm not sure, frankly.

Melinda

in-person vs remote participation (was: Newcomers… George, Wes
in-person vs remote participation (was: Newcomers… George, Wes
Re: in-person vs remote participation (was: Newco… Riccardo Bernardini
Re: in-person vs remote participation Melinda Shore
Re: in-person vs remote participation (was: Newco… Dave Crocker
Re: in-person vs remote participation (was: Newco… Michael Richardson