Longer or more meetings?

[Harrington, David]

Hi,

Maybe we should consider distributed tele/video conferences.

Many companies have started using teleconferences and video conferences =
as an alternative to face-to-face meetings, have the infrastructure in =
place to support these conference types, and either would be willing to =
sponsor a one or two day conference, or would be willing to for a small =
fee make their equipment available for the conference. Many companies' =
conference rooms also have white boards and projectors and other =
amenities that could help during the meeting.

By getting a number of geographically distributed conference "cells" =
connected, some travel costs might be mitigated for many, and the costs =
of sponsorship would be shared. Jabber use might also help for interims =
to reduce the exclusionary need to travel.

There is a potential benefit for this approach beyond travel costs.

We are constantly faced with the tradeoffs between small focused design =
groups and open process. Using a distributed conferencing approach to =
interims might permit us to leverage the benefits of each approach while =
balancing the tradeoffs and controlling costs.

With a distributed conference, it would be possible to, say, start the =
day with a four-hour open conference to identify the issues that needed =
resolving, and then to have each of the distributed teams assigned to =
independently research solutions for targeted issues (for maybe four =
hours offline), and then resume a four-hour open conference to discuss =
and try to integrate the proposals. For contentious issues, multiple =
design teams could work independently to develop proposals for =
consideration by the whole team. The use of distributed design teams =
within the conference promotes focused development and parallelism.

dbh

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Margaret Wasserman [mailto:mrw@windriver.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2002 6:57 AM
> To: Basavaraj.Patil@nokia.com
> Cc: jari.arkko@piuha.net; ekr@rtfm.com; hgs@cs.columbia.edu;
> john-ietf@jck.com; problem-statement@alvestrand.no
> Subject: RE: Longer or more meetings?
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> >And as someone also said the number of *active*
> >participants in any real WG is quite limited. I think it is=20
> quite possible
> >that the chairs could facilitate teleconferences on a regular basis
> >between these active folks without having to create design teams.
> >This would also be an effective means of making progress.
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> I think that teleconferences might help, but large teleconferences
> are expensive.  Just for a design team in which I recently=20
> participated,
> I spend thousands of dollars of my "communications" budget to host our
> teleconferences...  Hosting hundreds of participants on a regular
> basis would break my bank.
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> I've heard that the IEEE has regular teleconferences for their
> teams.  How are they funded?
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> Also, how will we train/prepare the WG chairs to run large
> teleconferences?  Doing so in an effective fashion is not easy.
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> Margaret
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