RE: Workshop and meeting requirements

> proper teleconferencing hardware.  VIDEO conferencing, with screensharing

All this sounds good, but I wonder about affordability: What kind of capital investment, bandwidth requirement,  and on-side manpower requirements are we talking about to do a TPAC-size meeting with proper A/V?

From: Chris Wilson [mailto:cwilso@google.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2014 12:23 PM
To: David Singer
Cc: public-w3process@w3.org
Subject: Re: Workshop and meeting requirements

On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 1:23 AM, David Singer <singer@mac.com<mailto:singer@mac.com>> wrote:
I agree that making remote participation the best it can be is important.  But you missed — and we missed you at — a lot of ‘hallway conversations’ and the opportunity for socializing ideas and so on, by being remote from Shenzhen. Being there really is better than being on the phone.

Indeed.  But you're never going to make it convenient (or even possible) for everyone to be in the same room.

I actually think that the W3C’s remote participation tools and techniques are quite good — more functional than some commercial projects — but that some amount of web engineering could make them even better.  On some WG calls, I have a chat session open, the spec., the tracker page (issues and actions), and the email threads — all in separate unlinked windows.  But they are all web resources.  Seems like a few tricks could really integrate these so participants are not dotting around between windows all the time.

It's not just that.  I think the culture of IRC and IRC minuting is good; I think the affordance for virtual participation is not.  For example, proper teleconferencing hardware.  VIDEO conferencing, with screensharing.  A culture of pre-publishing slides in web formats.  These things could all make remote participation much more effective, and although of course hallway conversations and socialization are lost, it would still result in much improved participation.  How many of the China participants from Shenzhen do we expect to see in Santa Clara?  Wouldn't we be better off if they could still more effectively participate?

-C