Subject: [103attendees] Remote participation in Plenaries

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2018 09:35:28 -0500

IESG,

As someone (whose name I didn't catch and whose voice I didn't
recognize, but many thanks) noticed just before the plenary
ended, I submitted a question via Jabber with "MIC" in front of
it shortly after the IESG took the stage.  What then happened is
probably more important than the question itself, which I will
come back to.

We claim to want to be welcoming to newcomers.  There was a good
deal of discussion about that subject during the IESG part of
the plenary, all of which I think was helpful.   However, as
costs of meetings and logistical complications rise, it is
important to understand that many newcomers will participate
remotely before attending their first meeting(s) and that
others, especially those who are not supported by companies or
organizations with unlimited resources, will do some meetings
remotely early in their IETF careers.  We also claim to be
supportive of remote participation, but that needs to be more
than just having the right technology in place.   Similar to the
comments that were made about experienced people treating each
other roughly in discussions having a bad effect on newcomers
and observers and discouraging involvement, having a plenary
with no effective way for remote participants to ask questions
or make comments sends a negative message about whether such
participation is really desired.   Noting that this is not the
first time in recent years at which questions arriving via
Jabber have been ignored in a plenary (at least this time, it
was caught although much too late) or given no attention, a
relatively experienced IETF participant is likely to respond, as
I am doing, by getting on the mailing list.  Someone who is new
and trying to understand whether it is possible to participate
effectively in the IETF may, instead, make an obvious inference
and just go away.   From that standpoint, an oversight about
Jabber input (whether in a plenary or a WG session) is at least
as problematic as experienced participants and old friends
calling each other bad names in a WG session.   If the assorted
mentoring/ guiding programs for f2f participants are going well,
it may be worse because, by midweek, f2f newcomers may know at
least one or two experienced people whom they could go ask what
is going on (or who might spontaneously be approached by those
people with an explanation).   We have no such support for
remote newcomers, despite repeated suggestions.

However, there is another aspect to what happened that may be
equally important.  Alissa apologized for forgetting to get a
Jabber scribe.  I appreciate the apology and agree that she
shouldn't have overlooked it.  But the problem is _NOT_ her
fault.  Anyone in the room could have noticed the omission and
called it to her attention.  No one did.   Anyone in the room
who was following the Jabber feed (and I recognized several
people on the Meetecho participant list who where clearly there)
could have noticed either the absence of a designated scribe
(any time in over two hours) or the question (only one hour
before that was noticed and read) and brought it to the
attention of whomever was at the front of the room at the time.
One of the IETF's important features and big advantages over
other SDOs is that we claim to function as a community (not
just, e.g., a collection of representatives of companies) and
mostly succeed at that.  But that makes these kinds of glitches
a community problem, not an IETF Chair, IESG, or, in the case of
WGs, a WG Chair problem.   If someone notices and doesn't speak
up on the theory that it noticing is someone else's job, that is
a community failure.   If a newcomer notices and speaks up, I
hope we can promise a round of applause (at least).

The question itself was about the current status of so-called
internationalization work in the IETF and, in particular, the
status of the recommendations from the BOF on processing that
work at IETF 102.  I know at least some of the answer; my reason
for asking is that I wanted to get a reaction from the IESG
because internationalization issues are not confined to the ART
area much less whichever ART AD is currently holding the short
straw.  Others may reasonably disagree but I think that, if we
are serious about attracting a diverse set of participants from
around the world, internationalization work is really important.
If we give it minimal attention, we are sending another kind of
message.   Missing the window of the IESG part of the plenary
largely defeated the purpose of the question.

Unfortunately, there were two additional problems after the
question was read.  First, the person reading it wasn't sure I
was the one who asked it.   I was using Jabber over Meetecho.
Due to our participant login procedure, Meetecho knew exactly
who I was and was displaying "John Klensin" (not some initials
or nickname that could be confused) next to the text in the chat
panel.  If that information isn't making it through to other
Jabber/XMPP clients or systems, there is a bug that is worth
tracking down and fixing.   Then, I gather someone, I presume
from context one of the ART ADs, answered the question from the
floor.  But I couldn't hear the answer or the identity of the
person answering at all.  The audio was very good through all of
the rest of the meeting so I have to assume that either the
question was answered away from the microphone, the floor mics
had been shut down, or the feed from the mics to Meetecho had
been disconnected.  Or course, by the time I could get something
equivalent of "no audio" typed into the Jabber room, the meeting
was over (even if I assumed that, by then, someone was watching
and would report).     If the problem was something that could
have been noticed and reported from within the meeting room, the
comments earlier in this note about community responsibility
apply.

Not the IETF's finest moment.

best,
     john

---

From: Alissa Cooper <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2018 07:41:00 +0700

Hi John,

Sincere apologies again for messing this up. I realize this is hugely frustrating.

As mentioned in the other threads, I suspect the lack of attention to the jabber channels more broadly is due in part to greater reliance on the remote queue. If people assume that more remote participation will be via audio/video and that chairs will manage the queue, perhaps fewer of those in the room are joining the jabber rooms or looking at them when they do.

Huge thanks again to Alice Russo for coming to the mic to relay the question. I see that Benjamin has followed up and obviously we can continue the discussion on the list as necessary even though we missed the opportunity in the plenary.

Apologies,
Alissa

> On Nov 7, 2018, at 9:35 PM, John C Klensin <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> IESG,
>

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2018 22:43:22 -0500

Alissa,

Thanks for the detailed responses.

> Sincere apologies again for messing this up. I realize this is

As I indicated in an earlier note and Ole Troan and others have
reinforced, your memory and related actions should be only the
first available mechanism.  While I'm hugely appreciative of
Alice for stepping in, the observation that no one else felt the
need and responsibility to step in much sooner -- either to
remind   you or just to read the question -- suggests to me that
we have developed a bit of a cultural problem in which IETF
participants feel less personal and collective responsibility
for the smooth functioning of the IETF than I think we need to
survive.  Maybe that is another sort of educational problem, but
I think it is more than that.

> As mentioned in the other threads, I suspect the lack of
> attention to the jabber channels more broadly is due in part
> to greater reliance on the remote queue. If people assume that
> more remote participation will be via audio/video and that
> chairs will manage the queue, perhaps fewer of those in the
> room are joining the jabber rooms or looking at them when they
> do.

But, as discussed at much more length in threads you have seen
but that I deliberately forked from the IETF and Attendees lists
to minimize what some would consider noise on the latter two, I
believe that the only people who know how the Meetecho remote
queue facilities and how to use them are WG Chairs who happened
to attend the right training session(s), current or relatively
recent members of "the leadership", people who have figured
things out in the process of doing remote presentations, those
who have chosen to carefully read Meetecho documents or go
through their training materials, and people who have either
been told by one of the above groups or figured it out by
accident.    Those groups together are a rather small fraction
of the IETF participant community and an even smaller fraction
of the community of participants who almost never attend f2f
IETF meetings.   At least in sessions I've been at in recent
years, there certainly are no regular WG announcements about how
to best participate remotely that point to Meetecho.  Generally
the only announcement is from the Jabber scribe about "MIC"
prefixes.

The other problem is that some of us have had bad experiences
with the remote queue facility -- not the technology but with WG
Chairs ignoring that queue or, more often, treating it in a way
that seems unfair relative to microphone lines in the room and
in-room back-and-forth conversations.   Absent some clear
messages that those problems have been solved, someone who has
been burned in that way may be a bit reluctant to go back.
These threads, if people are reading them, may be at least
partially solving that notification problem and raising general
awareness so maybe we should be glad that things did not go
smoothly Wednesday evening.

> Huge thanks again to Alice Russo for coming to the mic to
> relay the question. I see that Benjamin has followed up and
> obviously we can continue the discussion on the list as
> necessary even though we missed the opportunity in the plenary.

My thanks, again, to Alice.  As I (and I think Sandy) mentioned,
the in-room problem was compounded by the microphone Alexey (?)
was using being off or turned all the way down as far as
Meetecho was concerned.   That raises a meeting venue question
of whether "hotel/venue staff are going to operate AV equipment
themselves" goes on the immediate showstopper list that should
cause us to drop the venue from consideration if we can't
negotiate it away.   I can certainly remember other occasions in
which venue staff operating AV gear has left us without
functional remote feeds; I suppose we should be grateful that
this time was not worse.

I'm not going to try to get back to the substantive question
on-list before this week is over and most participants have had
a change to get home and, where relevant, recover from jet lag.
That isn't an indication that I think it is less important than
other things, only that I want to try to be realistic about the
bandwidth of those who are in Bangkok or covering more sessions
than I am.  However, I tried to ask the question at the plenary
for the same reason I participated in asking for the IETF 102
BOF.  While it is perfectly reasonable for the IESG to decide
that the ART Area should take the lead, i18n topics and issues
have the potential to interact with several of our Areas.  I see
the topic(s) as being of some urgency, more urgency than the
speed at which we seem to be moving to address them suggests.
I wanted to try to understand whether the IESG shares that sense
of urgency.  If it does not, I think it is important that the
community understand your reasoning because it may affect the
course of some protocol development work as well as who chooses
to invest time in IETF work rather than looking elsewhere.

best,
    john