Subject: Re: [Manycouches] Further update on COVID-19 (Coronavirus) and IETF 107 Vancouver

From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2020 10:35:58 -0500

Vittorio Bertola <vittorio.bertola=[email-masked]> wrote:
    > As ICANN (who has decided to go fully online) is discovering, even if
    > you solved the infrastructural problem (which they apparently plan to
    > solve by using Zoom), there are many problems in running a purely
    > virtual meeting, in addition to the basic ones of missing all the
    > informal interaction, which is usually key to getting the hardest
    > issues solved, and of crippling the emotional and non-verbal
    > communication, which leads much more easily to confrontation.

+1

    > For example, the timezone problem: no matter which timezone you are in,
    > there will be people for which the meeting will be out of working
    > hours, often during the night. While your employer and your family will
    > accept to "lose" you for a week if you go physically elsewhere, it is
    > much harder to get that accepted if you are home - they will easily
    > still expect you to be available during the day at least for important
    > stuff. As a minimum, your attention will be partly diverted and your
    > physical state will be hampered, and as a maximum, you will miss good
    > chunks of the meeting. In some cases, working at night would even be
    > incompatible with local labour laws.

Having done a lot of remote attendance a decade ago because of a young
family, I want to emphasize that it's really hard to explain to a 3yr old why
you need to be sleep at 10am.

    > Or the connectivity problem: possibly this is stronger for ICANN, which
    > has a significant share of participants from parts of the world where
    > connectivity is worse, but not everyone has broadband connectivity
    > readily available; actually, many African participants told ICANN that
    > they do not have any connectivity at home, and they only connect from
    > an office which will be closed during the daytime of the timezone of
    > the meeting. And if they have connectivity, e.g. through mobile
    > networks, it's often prohibitively expensive for day-long

This argues that the way forward for reducing CO2 cost and pandemic risk is
for having local hubs within one's normal commuting distance.
This ought to be something that the co-working spaces ought to jump on.
It would be nice if ISOC and ICANN could take a leadership role here.

    > More generally, people with worse connectivity will have harder times
    > in understanding others (especially if English is not their mother
    > tongue), being given the floor, making their points, gaining support
    > for them etc (though some careful chairmanship could partly address
    > this).

Agreed.
It might make simultaneous translation easier if we can do it all remote.
It would be nice if webex/zoom/meetecho could evolve to have multiple audio
streams.

    > P.S. Now for the less topical part - sorry but I have to say this:

...(url ommitted on purpose)

    > It's nice to see that politicians overreacting and spreading panic
    > globally just to show their local voters that they "do something about
    > it" are not a prerogative of Italy only!

"something must be done"
(SFO apparently has to declare the emergency to get the mechanisms in place
in advance.  This is in itself a pathology)

--
Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>, Sandelman Software Works
 -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-

---

From: Nick Hilliard <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2020 16:34:03 +0000

> you need to be sleep at 10am.

this applies to 3-year-old family members of all ages :-/

Nick

---

From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2020 21:00:05 +0100

> this applies to 3-year-old family members of all ages :-/

And to 3-year-old bosses, too.

Grüße, Carsten