ineffective use of meeting time

[Joel M. Halpern]

I will admit to surprise when it took 35 minutes for one working group to 
review status.
I noted several causes, all of which are relevant.
1) There were an imense number of documents on the working groups 
plate.  If documents are not getting sufficient review in groups with 3 
documents, then having some 20 documents seems a guarantee for insufficient 
review
2) We do not train our chairs in presentation skills.  Doing that sort of 
review quickly takes skill and practice.  (I actually think a brief status 
review is helpful.)
3) The group is working on quite diverse topics, and so the chair had to 
spend time explaining the relationship of the topics.  Again, this seems a 
sign of a working group that is likely to have difficulty.

Now, to tie this back to problems:
1) We still tend to have problems of working groups with large scopes
2) We do not actually provide skills training for WG Chairs or ADs.  Both 
jobs take skill.  It is not acquired by magic, and is hard to acquire by 
osmosis.  The result is frequently under-trained leaders.

Yours,
Joel M. Halpern

At 09:15 AM 3/22/2003 -0600, Basavaraj.Patil at nokia.com wrote:

>Effective use of WG meeting time is something that WG chairs
>should be trained on. For example we spend at least an average
>of 10 minutes giving a status update of WG documents. I think
>the status is already known before the WG meeting and simply
>putting the status of the WG documents at some URL is sufficient.
>Some of the WGs that have a large number of WG documents take
>up valuable time from the agenda with no real feedback received
>as a result of the status update.
>But I do agree that it is sometimes valuable to have presentations
>that help the WG make progress. Again I think this is something
>that chairs should have a say on and be able to determine.
>
>-Basavaraj
>
> >
> > Keith-
> >
> > I agree with you frusteration but I also think that a short
> > presentation is useful for focusing the group on the topic at hand to
> > get a more useful discussion.  If you want to have disussion on a
> > bunch of topics...
> >
> > --aaron
> >
> > Keith Moore wrote:
> > > I just realized that the problem-statement WG is currently
> > providing a
> > > very good example of one of our biggest problems with the way we do
> > > work:
> > >
> > > we have precious little face-to-face meeting time.  despite
> > this, we
> > > spend the vast majority of our meetings in presentations of
> > material
> > > that could (in most cases) easily be published as
> > internet-drafts and
> > > read by participants at other times.
> > >
> > > the one thing we can do in meetings that we can't do online
> > is discuss
> > > things face-to-face, and take advantage of the increased
> > fidelity and
> > > bandwidth of communication in meatspace.  this is often incredibly
> > > useful for reducing dissent and promoting closure. but when
> > we try to
> > > do this in meetings, we are told that the agenda is full
> > with speakers
> > > and that we are already behind schedule.
> > >
> > > Keith
> >