Re: HTML WG F2F meeting

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.

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).

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Wednesday, 27 January 2010 07:22:23 UTC