Yoav Nir <[email protected]> wrote: > > Questions and comments from disembodied voices are disruptive.
I don't think I'd agree they're necessarily "disruptive", but thank you for stating something specific enough to talk about. There are definitely cases where the number of participants in the physical room is small enough that you can follow exactly who's talking. In such cases, I agree that adding a voice not in the room and not clearly identified _is_ disruptive. But this doesn't strike me as impossible to overcome. If it's clear who's participating remotely, and abundantly clear which one of them is talking, it need not be disruptive. (However, it shouldn't be a surprise when one of the remote participants starts talking!) > It's difficult to tell who's talking and what they're saying, That we can fix. > and the person talking has a hard time telling if their question was > heard, and it just gets worse for non-native English speakers. Yes, that can be hard. The state of the art in echo cancellation isn't good enough for the remote participant to hear the room reaction in real-time, unless s/he is using headphones (in which case the echo of his/her own voice is likely disruptive to the remote speaker). The surest cure is for a local participant to "restate" the question if it seems unclear. (It's not all that unusual for a speaker to restate a local question anyway.) > Questions in writing read off a screen or by either a chair or a > "jabber scribe" flow more naturally. Questions in writing always make it easier to be sure you're answering the right question. (I suspect we could benefit by asking for questions in writing before putting any questioner on-mike...) > Yes, it's difficult to carry the conversation with jabber, but I don't > think that works too well with a disembodied voice either. There is a largely-solved problem of when to pause and when to speak whenever delay exceeds about 100 milliseconds. But people do adjust... > I remember we were both at a particular session in Taipei, where the > absent co-chair kept coming on the speaker. I believe you'll agree > that this was disrupting the normal flow of conversation. Not having been there, I can't "agree"; but it seems likely... Nonetheless, when a WGC _needs_ to say something, it's best to _say_ it. Admitedly, not all WGCs limit themselves to what _needs_ to be said. > With the presentor we don't have much choice. It's either remote-voice > or not at all or have someone else give the presentation. A single > disembodied voice is better than not getting the presentation at all. I agree. Further, I'd opine that presentations by local attendees that aren't _very_ familiar with the work are inherently problemmatic. I'd like to try to state these problems of remote participation, and see if we can come up with "requirements" which ameliorate them. > Yoav -- John Leslie <[email protected]> _______________________________________________ NOTE WELL: This list operates according to http://mipassoc.org/dkim/ietf-list-rules.html. https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/vmeet
