On Thu, Feb 13, 2003 at 10:33:58PM -0800, Randy Bush wrote:
>
> i have used jabber in ietf meetings and similarcontexts. it works
> to coordinate stuff in real-time. but that was not my application
> this time. i really was after the as much content of the meeting
> as possible. to do that well in jabber or whatever, one would have
> to pay a court transcription person. whereas, as someone already
> pointed out, a cheap video camera does the job.
On the other hand, it's much faster and convenient to scan (and
search) a text transcript compared to viewing a video feed. It also
takes up less space to store. It's extremely amusing to think of a
scribe as a compression algorithm, but that's basically what's going
on. Unfortunately, as always, compression can sometimes be expensive.
In some cases we might be able to get cheap grad students. Or perhaps
we could find people who would be willing to transcribe 2 or 3 wg
sessions that they aren't otherwise participating in exchange for a
deep discount on their registration fee? There would need to be some
quality control (maybe the wg chair has to certify afterwards that the
transcript was an accurate record of the proceedings), but it would
help make much better minutes.
Of course, there are some downsides to having a non-participant scribe
or take minutes for a meeting. Someone who is familiar with the
background, context, and (unfortunately, sometimes) jargon of a
working group can often take better minutes than an outsider. On the
other hand, it is very hard to take good minutes and/or scribe while
participating in the discussion, and often the minutes will suffer for
those portions of the meeting where the minute-taker also wants to
join into the discussion. (Or stand in line at the mike, etc.)
That being said, though, I think that if the scribe was comprehensive
enough, and the text was then immediately reviewed by the wg chairs
and other core participants in the meeting, while the discusions was
still fresh in their minds, the result might be a much *better* record
of what happened than the current system of taking minutes for the
meeting.
- Ted
