Re: [802SEC] Electronic Participation in Interim Meetings
Mat-
I have very mixed feelings about this. You make no mention of, nor do we
have any policy to regulate whether such participation will be available
without payment of the full registration fee. In lieu of any special policy
at the 802 level (nor do I know of any equivalent policy in any 802
approved WG procedures) it would be my opinion that normal registration
rules apply and anybody who does not pay and attends a meeting would (under
802 rules) be considered a deadbeat.
On the PRO side
- For a "new activity, this is a lower threshold way to pull
participants into what we are doing
- Clearly, most folks are more cost sensitive this year. This (at
least) eliminates the cost of air travel and mtg venue hotels for the
participants.
On the CON side
- We do not have any established way to do voting in this sort of
mixed session.
- For a "new activity, this is a lower threshold way to pull
participants into what we are doing thus increasing the risk of dominance
issues.
- The quality level of personal interaction is clearly lower. Studies
have shown that electronic meetings among people who do not know each other
already are significantly less effective than those of established groups
whose members are used to working with each other.
- The quality of default conferencing tools is still pretty poor in my
opinion. I would be interested in 802 moving up the ladder on this by
putting tools in place to just show the meeting room screen on attendee
laptops IN THE meeting rooms. Some of meeting rooms are so large that you
can't read the screen even if you do come to the meeting.
You assert that there is "no rule against this". I would make the counter
assertion that this is not true. Meeting attendance credit by rule is only
granted to those who (a) pay the meeting registration fee and (b) are in
the room to sign the real or virtual attendance book.
I think this will degrade the quality of our meetings. My fear is that it
will slip through on your metrics but still have a net negative effect on
meeting and output quality.
I would be much more interested in seeing some work on true "multi-site"
interims where an interim was held in several sites (e.g. Europe, Boston,
Silicon Valley, Far East) that were hooked together with high-quality
tele-presence. That would be a much more even-handed situation and offers,
I believe greater promise.
Best regards,
Geoff
At 09:54 AM 1/10/2009 , Sherman, Matthew J. (US SSA) wrote:
EC Members,
I have received requests from TV Whitespace ECSG members to allow
electronic participation (teleconference / Webex) for the ECSG meetings at
the upcoming Wireless Interim in LA. I have discussed this with the IEEE
802.11 Chair (Bruce) who has no objection, and made sure that appropriate
facilities are available. I checked with the IEEE 802 chair (Paul) who
said he would permit electronic participation for the ECSG at the interim
if it was conducted as an 'Experiment' (with hypothesis and metrics) to see
if it adds clear value to the standards process. Accordingly we have
formulated a hypothesis and metrics and plan to conduct three two hour
meetings at the wireless interim that include electronic participation, and
will conduct straw polls at the end of the session to see if the metrics
support our hypothesis. We will make the results of this experiment
available to the EC at the March session, along with other planned outputs
from the ECSG.
If you have any questions about this, please feel free to contact me.
Best Regards,
Matthew Sherman
Chair, IEEE802 Whitespace ECSG
BAE Systems - Network Systems (NS)
Office: +1 973.633.6344
Cell: +1 973.229.9520
email: matthew.sherman@baesystems.com
<mailto:matthew.sherman@baesystems.com>
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