Subject: Any surprises at IETF 107 virtual BOFs?

From: Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2020 14:09:25 -0500

Dear Working Group Chairs,

Most of the sessions during IETF 107 meeting week were either BOFs or
first-time working group meetings. I'll be co-chairing a BOF during IETF
108 meeting week, and thought it would be good to ask this group if you
experienced any weirdness at one or more IETF 107 BOFs that likely would
not have happened at an in-person meeting.

Thanks in advance for any clues you can provide.

Best,

Spencer, who wants my BOF proponents to get a fair hearing during our
100-minute session!

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From: Wes Hardaker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2020 20:55:19 -0700

> Thanks in advance for any clues you can provide.

Unsure how helpful this is: but I did hear from a number of people that
were at BOFs or ran one (I didn't) that there was a mixed opinion, but
definitely leaning toward positive overall.  Some even said that it
probably went better virtually than it would have in person.

-- 
Wes Hardaker
USC/ISI

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From: Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2020 09:05:53 -0500

Hi, Wes,

> probably went better virtually than it would have in person.

Thanks, Wes, that's helpful.

One thing I wondered about was that it seemed like the jabber rooms were
significantly more active than during BOFs at face to face meetings (I
might have tapped Christian on the shoulder at a face to face meeting, but
having side conversations in jabber was significantly easier at a virtual
BOF). Did other people notice that?

I also wondered about "reading the room" - typically we end BOFs with
questions like the questions at the end of
https://tools.ietf.org/html//rfc5434#section-4, but we don't know how to
hum virtually, so I'd like to do this as well as we can, to be helpful to
proponents and ADs. Did anyone have thoughts about that?

Best,

Spencer

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From: Martin Duke <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2020 08:24:34 -0700

FWIW, you will have an experimental virtual hum tool via Meetecho. Perhaps
it will be helpful.

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From: Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2020 10:30:22 -0500

Hi, Martin,

>> proponents and ADs. Did anyone have thoughts about that?
Thanks for the clue on this!

Best,

Spencer

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From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2020 17:54:34 +0200

On 2020-06-26, at 16:05, Spencer Dawkins at IETF <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> One thing I wondered about was that it seemed like the jabber rooms were significantly more active than during BOFs at face to face meetings (I might have tapped Christian on the shoulder at a face to face meeting, but having side conversations in jabber was significantly easier at a virtual BOF). Did other people notice that?

Definitely.  We used to have “bad attitude” streams for plenaries, but the BOF jabbers was “bad attitude” mixed with discussion that tended to be more substantive and more significant than what happened in the official BOF on the audio channel.

[I once gave a talk at a conference that had an informal participant-organized “bad attitude”-like channel, and I managed to capture the discussion.  I learned more from that than from the rest of the conference, both about my presentation style (too much German accent) and on the reasons why people didn’t want to listen (our position was breaking with certain preconceived, now outdated, but then fashionable, notions).  I’m sure people will learn a lot from the jabber channels of BOFs, even if some of the context (what did someone just say that made people react so violently) is hard to reconstruct after the fact.]

Grüße, Carsten

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From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2020 18:46:08 +0200

The accent thing is IMHO a reminder for me for another suggestion point:

[Disclaimer: no need to blackhole the following suggestion with all the known
 critiques on death by powerpoint, need for interactivity and the like, i am
 just commenting on how to leverage the benefits of virtual conference for what
 i actually see most session slots in IETF eing most about, not what they
 should be about... but never are for decades.]

I was on a session at a research conference in corona times where the organizerrs where
(rightfully?) concerned about connectivity, so they actually asked all the presenters to submit
upfront a recorded video clip of their presentation, and then during the session itself
you could talk live or instead the video clip could be shown. Given how i think everybody
(including myself) probably had tried to optimize the pre-recorded speech, everybody
decided to let the video clip run.

Non-withstanding any other reasons, it might be useful to actually give the same
or modified suggestions to presenters for WGs:

-> If you do a pre-recording, the WG chair can run it in your slot, even if everything
   else fails for you (no good enough internet connectivity during WG session).
-> WG chairs always prefer to have you talk live, but... (see above, see below).

Now, in addtional to broken/crappy internet, there is also the issue of
understanding folks with hard to understand accents. And this is probably worse
for other non-native english speakers listening than for native english speakers
(depending on accent compatiblity matrices ;-). But we're all by default too
 shy/nice, but effectively too silly to talk about this beause we fear it
 would be taken as too offensive/non-inclusive to complain about accents.

During that research conference, every presentation came with an ok.. mediocre accent
except one presentation that was really a marketing-sales-clip with animated graphics
and a professional british english accent speaker. 

When watching that video clip during the conference, all my anti-genes fired off with thoughts like
"unfair to other speakers,  hired speakers not welcome, seriously - british accent?",
but after cooling off, and recognizing that the payload of the text was actually
just very well refined technical explanations and no marketing BS, i came
to realize that one should really consider how especially in virtual meeting
times this type of approach should also be considered as someting that can
be quite helpful for the technical discussions we want to have.

Aka: I would be happy to give the suggestion to the WG to consider finding
another speaker for a recorded presentation if one fears that ones own accent
might make it more difficult to get the message over.

Cheers
    toerless

On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 05:54:34PM +0200, Carsten Bormann wrote:
> Definitely.  We used to have ???bad attitude??? streams for plenaries, but the BOF jabbers was ???bad attitude??? mixed with discussion that tended to be more substantive and more significant than what happened in the official BOF on the audio channel.
> 
> [I once gave a talk at a conference that had an informal participant-organized ???bad attitude???-like channel, and I managed to capture the discussion.  I learned more from that than from the rest of the conference, both about my presentation style (too much German accent) and on the reasons why people didn???t want to listen (our position was breaking with certain preconceived, now outdated, but then fashionable, notions).  I???m sure people will learn a lot from the jabber channels of BOFs, even if some of the context (what did someone just say that made people react so violently) is hard to reconstruct after the fact.]
> 
> Grüße, Carsten

-- 
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[email-masked]

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From: Carsten Bormann <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2020 22:03:28 +0200

So how do we handle pre-recorded video?  Should people view that ahead of time?  Is there a way to bring video into the meeting?

Sent from mobile, sorry for terse

> On 26. Jun 2020, at 18:46, Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]> wrote:
>

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From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2020 22:18:19 +0200

In the research conference, they where just pasting the youtube URL into the webex chat
and everyone watched on their own.

Obviously, we would put these URL into etherpad and later meeting minutes.

In webex, you can play video clips, but alas if you do it directly, 
AFAIK it will not work with RTCweb webex clients. I have your suggestion
to use BBB on my todo list, alas, too much IETF draft and other work
to do to try out if BBB is as much better than webex as it seems to be.

Aka: If one wants a more interactive version of a pre-recorded presentation
it would certainly be important to play live and stop after each slide
or section and do live Q&A, but today with our webex and RTCweb client
requirement, it would have to be via app sharing and sufficient uplink/downlink
speed. Shouldn't be _that_ bad given how it would be slides and not face video.

Viewing ahead of time would be indeed another benefit, just like reading
the draft upfront is. Hence put into meeting agenda/etherpad upfront...

general disclaimer repetition: Youtube and many other USA OTT content
redistributor are not available from china and other countries, i am
still not sure what a real good _single_ upload recommend wrt. to 
IETF relevant participant reach would be. Anything europe, but i have no
idea... Suggestions ?

Even if you dont end up using the video clip, it does make new
presenters think about practicing for the video clip...

Cheers
    Toerless

On Fri, Jun 26, 2020 at 10:03:28PM +0200, Carsten Bormann wrote:
> > ???The accent thing is IMHO a reminder for me for another suggestion point:
> > 

-- 
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[email-masked]

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From: Michael Richardson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2020 18:58:58 -0400

I am also co-chairing a BOF at IETF108.

    > BOF). Did other people notice that?

I think that at IETF107, the agenda format, which preferred new WGs and BOFs
and had virtually no conflicts, contributed to a much higher attendance.

In general, at physical meetings and when remote, I personally will prefer
attendance at a BOF over a conflicting meeting in which I have no document.
I do this because the most important take-home from a BOF for me is: "This is
not relevant to me". (The converse takes much more work to establish)

So, we are not repeating that format for IETF108, and I suspect that we will
have far fewer people.  Plus summer in many places, and stage-2 re-opening in
many places, vs the nothing-else-to-do-ness of March.

    > proponents and ADs. Did anyone have thoughts about that?

I would like to encourage idle chat and open microphones for the first [-5, +5]
minutes in order to:
  a) know who is there.
  b) know if microphones work ahead of time

This is harder to do with meetecho than with webex/meet.foo/zoom/etc.
I hope we will have some opportunities to try the meetecho updates the week
before the meeting!

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

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From: "Bron Gondwana" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2020 09:13:17 +1000

> Definitely. We used to have “bad attitude” streams for plenaries, but the BOF jabbers was “bad attitude” mixed with discussion that tended to be more substantive and more significant than what happ…

As a somewhat counterpoint to this, I was in person at the very well attended and contentious BIMI bof at IETF104, and the jabber backchannel right there in the room was happening in much the same way that the jabber backchannel at IETF107 was. 

I'd still say that the backchannel is slightly easier because everyone has their screen out and in front of them when we're online, whereas a percentage won't have at the in-person meetings.

Bron.

--
 Bron Gondwana, CEO, Fastmail Pty Ltd
 [email-masked]

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From: Dave Lawrence <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2020 21:43:17 -0400

Toerless Eckert writes:

> Youtube and many other USA OTT content redistributor are not
> available from china and other countries, i am still not sure what a
> real good _single_ upload recommend wrt. to IETF relevant
> participant reach would be. Anything europe, but i have no idea... 
> Suggestions ?

15 second TikTok clips.  Must be set to a catchy beat.  Just think of
all the agenda time we'll get back.