On 8/4/2013 3:10 PM, Hadriel Kaplan wrote:
OK, I'll bite. Why do you and Michael believe you need to have the slides 1
week in advance?
You have the agenda and drafts 2 weeks in advance. The slides aren't
normative. Even when they're not about a draft in particular, the slides are
not self-standing documents. They're merely to help with discussion.
Not getting the slides at all is a different matter - but 7 days in advance is
counter-productive. They should be as up-to-date as practical, to take into
account mailing list discussions. [or at least that's how I justify my
same-day, ultra-fresh slides]
If you need to have them on the website 7 days in advance, you really need to
get a faster Internet connection. ;)
I'm a TSV AD, but I'm sending this note wearing no hat (someone last
week asked me why I wasn't wearing a cowboy hat if I was from Texas -
no, not even a cowboy hat).
I read through the discussion on this, and I'm only responding to
Hadriel because his post was the last one I saw before replying. Thank
you all for sharing your thoughts.
YMMV ("Your Mileage May Vary"), but I have been sponsored for several
years by a company that sends a sizable number of folks to IETF who are
not native English speakers. Having slides early helps non-native
English speakers (I believe I've heard that some slide decks are
translated into other languages, although I wouldn't know, because I
read the slides in English).
After his first IETF (Paris/63), Fuyou Maio said to me, "understanding
spoken English is the short board in the water barrel" (the idea being
that your effectiveness at the IETF is limited by your ability to
quickly parse spoken English). The folks I talk to get plenty of chances
to translate spoken English during Q&A, and don't need additional
practice translating the presentations in real time. Yes, I know people
say things that aren't on their slides, but if what's on their slides
doesn't help other people understand what they are saying, they probably
shouldn't be using those slides.
In the mid-2000s, I remember an admonition for chairs to write out the
questions the chairs are taking a hum on, to accommodate non-native
English speakers (and to write out all the questions before taking the
first hum, to accommodate anyone who agrees with the second choice but
prefer the fourth choice when they hear it after humming).
I'm having a hard time making the "a week early or you don't present"
case for slide cutoffs, because we DO talk during the meeting week - and
in groups RTCWeb, with a Thursday slot and a Friday slot, we had time to
talk a lot. If the cutoff was for presentations of new individual
drafts, that's a different question, so there might be some way to make
non-Procrustean improvements(*).
I agree with the "chairs looking at slides for sanity" point. I'm
remembering more than one working group where we chairs got
presentations that included about a slide per minute for the time
allocated to the topic - noticing that even one day before saved us from
the ever-popular "we can't talk about this presentation because we don't
have time" moment.
During IETF 87, I had reason to consult the proceedings for the
non-workgroup-forming RUTS BOF ("Requirements for Unicast
Transport/Sessions" at IETF 43, minutes at
http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/43/43rd-ietf-98dec-142.html#TopOfPage)
<http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/43/43rd-ietf-98dec-142.html#TopOfPage>.
This was the applications-focused wishlist for transport from 1998, when
COPS, RADIUS, L2TP, HTTP-NG, SIP, NFSv4, SS7, IP Telephony and BGP4 were
all trying to figure out whether they needed to (continue to, in some
cases) rely on TCP for transport, or do "something else". I'm
remembering that there were slides, and I would love to have them to
refer to, but *none* of the slide decks made it into the proceedings.
That was pre-Meeting Materials page, but even my experience with the
Meeting Materials page was that it's easier for slide decks arriving
late to go missing than for slide decks that arrived early.
As I reminded myself while starting to present v4 of the chair slides in
TSVAREA and realizing that what Martin was projecting was v1 (only a day
older), getting slidesets nailed down early limits the number of times
when you're surprised at what's being projected.
I love consolidated slide decks. I bet anyone does, whose laptop
blue-screened while hooking up to a projector in the late 1990s. Nothing
good happens during transitions, whether switching laptops or switching
presentations :-)
None of this should be taken as disagreement with proposals to
experiment with room shapes, whiteboards, , etc. that I heard last week.
None of this should be taken as evidence of love for an unbroken stream
of presentations of drafts that aren't tied to issues discussed on
mailing lists, or as disagreement with the idea that presentations
aren't always the best way to communicate at the IETF.
Thanks,
Spencer, who also might disagree with some of this when he wakes up at a
normal hour ... and that hasn't happened yet ...
(*) from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Procrustean, "producing or
designed to produce strict conformity by ruthless or arbitrary means".
