Taking to www-archive since I'm not sure this is super interesting for public-html but I find it interesting enough to answer.
On Jan 26, 2010, at 11:21 PM, Ian Hickson wrote: > On Tue, 26 Jan 2010, Maciej Stachowiak wrote: >> >> Now, I wouldn't claim this is primarily due to face-to-face meetings. >> Rather, I think it is due to a strong desire on the part of the chairs >> and many Working Group members to get issues resolved, and due to having >> a well-defined process for settling issues in a definitive way. Most of >> the success we have seen has been via email interaction. But I do not >> see support for the hypothesis that face-to-face meetings hurt our >> effectiveness, or even that it has been deteriorating over time. > > They certainly haven't been helping, IMHO. The recent progress is, as you > mention, much more about the chairs finally getting around to doing some > chairing than about anything that happened in Santa Clara. Thanks for saying we're doing our job... I guess? > > To put it another way: > > I think if we are to have another F2F, we should, before the meeting, set > out clear measurable objective criteria by which we can determine whether > or not the meeting was productive, so that we don't fall into the pattern > of just having more meetings out of inertia. > > I think we should do the same for teleconferences. It's not clear to me > what they are for, and I see no objective measure of whether they are > serving their purpose. I have so far dialed into two teleconferences, and > they have both, IMHO, been utter wastes of time, with nothing done in > those conferences that couldn't be done trivially by e-mail (or indeed, > not done at all). I'll comment on the f2f later (thoughts both pro and con), but let me talk about telecons. I think there's only three really important functions that WG Chairs serve: (a) Interface with the W3C Team for needed bureaucratic processes (such as publication and transition requests). (b) Make sure that the Working Group is a productive environment and makes forward progress. (c) Make sure Working Group members are informed about within the Working Group and relevant information from outside the Working Group. As a co-Chair I take responsibility (c) pretty seriously. Since our Working Group is huge and widely distributed, keeping everyone informed is a big job and has to take place on a wide variety of media. Those who follow the mailing list have doubtless seen many emails from the Chairs with announcements, reminders, and general information. Some people have a hard time following the list. Telecons are one of the traditional ways to communicate, and seem to help 15-30 people every week get better informed. Personally, I also try to make myself available on IRC, via private email, and even on IM and personal phone calls if necessary, to answer questions from WG participants. I also try very hard to make sure relevant status information is readily available on the Web. As far as I am concerned, making sure that information (including deadline reminders) flows to people who prefer telephone communication to email is the primary, perhaps sole purpose of the telecons. At one point I thought it might be worthwhile to summarize anything interesting that happened in the telecons by email, but it seems the information flow is mostly in the other direction, and most important things have already been mentioned over email by the time the telecon happens. Now, maybe we could gauge the relative effectiveness of different modes of communication, and do a cost-benefit analysis. But it seems to me it's pretty hard to figure out how to do that. Would we give people a quiz? Would we cut off one or more modes of communication for a period of time to see if it materially affected people's awareness? Let's say we learned the telecons make absolutely no difference to WG participant awareness of information. What would we save? We have been consistently finishing early, so 45 minutes of telephone time per week for each co-Chair, plus 30 minutes or so to prepare the agenda every three weeks. For those who choose to attend, revealed preference shows that what they get out of it is worth more than ~45 minutes of their time a week. For those who choose not to attend, I believe they are not missing out, so long as they follow the mailing list reasonably closely. Thus, the only real benefit would be saving each of the Chairs an average of about an hour of time a week. Personally, I don't find it worth my time to design and execute an effectiveness study (and deal with the inevitable debate over experiment design and validity of the results) to save an hour of time per week. I'm also not sure why you are worried about the telecons, because I don't think the fact that they happen costs you anything personally. You are not missing out on any needed info, and by charter they can't be a mechanism to cut anyone out of the loop of decision-making. With an f2f, granted, it would be different, as I think those failing to attend may lose the benefit of useful coordination and "face time" which would not IMO be purely redundant with mailing list content. And it is a significantly greater cost for those who attend, in both time and money. Thus, we need to take cost-benefit analysis seriously in that case. Regards, Maciej
