Re: [802SEC] Status on Whitespace Electronic Participation Experiment
I was very disappointed in the running of the whitespace meeting. A lot of
time was wasted on informing the remote participants on what was happening
and getting someone on the call set up to present. I would say that this is
not the way to conduct IEEE 802 business during a plenary or interim
meeting. Those that are committed to attend, pay the expenses, and get as
much done as possible were treated to a situation where the remote
participants significantly disrupted the official attendees.
If possible, I would recommend canceling phone participation for the rest of
this meeting and getting some work done with those attending.
Regards, John
On 1/21/09 12:10 PM, "Sherman, Matthew J. (US SSA)"
<matthew.sherman@baesystems.com> wrote:
> Dave,
>
> I gave you a longer personal opinion privately, but for the public
> space....
>
> I chose not to bring any votes to the group mostly because I don't think
> any critical decisions need to be reached this meeting, and I feel it is
> confusing to the whitespace participants who are normally allowed to
> vote on teleconferences, and would not have been allowed to do so at
> this meeting.
>
> I think the productivity question is still open. This is the first day
> for our first time doing this. We had 110 participants, and how fast
> the meeting should move is a relative opinion. My goal is to gather
> data (especially opinions such as yours) and present them to the EC.
> I'd prefer not to judge the outcome of the experiment until all the data
> is collected. I have an opinion (as you know) but would prefer to let
> the EC decide this once we have the data.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Mat
>
> Matthew Sherman, Ph.D.
> Engineering Fellow
> BAE Systems - Network Systems (NS)
> Office: +1 973.633.6344
> Cell: +1 973.229.9520
> email: matthew.sherman@baesystems.com
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Bagby [mailto:david.bagby@ieee.org]
> Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2009 12:49 PM
> To: Sherman, Matthew J. (US SSA); STDS-802-SEC@LISTSERV.IEEE.ORG;
> WHITESPACE@LISTSERV.IEEE.ORG
> Subject: RE: [802SEC] Status on Whitespace Electronic Participation
> Experiment
>
> Mat -
> An observation from a mtg attendee...
> During the session yesterday a question was asked about taking a vote -
> and
> the response was that there was a desire to not vote until a conf call
> next
> week. When asked why in a conf call instead of in the F2F session, the
> response was because the people attending by phone could not vote.
>
> I found that odd. The primary rule was that remote/phone attendance
> would
> not be allowed to impact the in person attendees. Yet, here was an
> example
> where the simple presence of remote attendees was the reason given for
> the
> F2F members not being able to take a vote and make a formal decision.
>
> Add this to your comments of the pace being slow due to remote attendees
> and
> I think it is clear that remote attendance has a negative impact on f2f
> meeting productivity.
>
> The question for the group will be do they want to pay that productivity
> cost?
>
> Dave
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-stds-802-sec@ieee.org [mailto:owner-stds-802-sec@ieee.org]
> On
> Behalf Of Sherman, Matthew J. (US SSA)
> Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2009 9:58 PM
> To: STDS-802-SEC@LISTSERV.IEEE.ORG; WHITESPACE@LISTSERV.IEEE.ORG
> Subject: [802SEC] Status on Whitespace Electronic Participation
> Experiment
>
> EC and Whitespace Members,
>
>
>
> The electronic participation experiment is not over yet. It will be
> running for two more days but here are some early observations.
>
>
>
> Overall I felt one participant best summed it up saying 'it works, but
> the pace is that of a large meeting with a couple of hundred people'. I
> agreed with this opinion, but others may feel differently. We were able
> to make study progress, but it felt like we were in a larger 802.11 or
> 802.16 session. In actuality we had about 90 people in the room and 20
> on the webex.
>
>
>
> The hybrid device which allows the phone line to couple to the PA system
> and vice versa I feel is essential for any large in-person meeting. It
> seems to generally work well. Installing it wasn't very difficult, but
> I did need to request some cables from the hotels A/V staff to get it
> plugged in. We had some initial leveling problems when we started the
> meeting today. I believe these were all resolved within about 15
> minutes and hope to have no start up issues when we start tomorrow.
>
>
>
> It was strongly recommended that we use Microphones with switches on
> them. I did try everything out last night and requested the hotel staff
> to switch out the mikes in the room (which had no switches) with mikes
> that did. This was slightly problematic since they don't normally use
> mikes with switches, but they eventually found a couple of older mikes
> with switches that worked fine. In the end, we left the mikes on all
> the time. There did not seem to be a need to switch them on and off.
> But since different hotels will have different equipment, it might not
> be a bad idea in general.
>
>
>
> Steve Shellhammer chaired the meeting, and I focused on making sure the
> electronic participation ran as smoothly as possible. Unfortunately,
> Steve and I weren't quite prepared enough. We had some connectivity
> problems that had nothing to do with the experiment, and we had to
> switch rolls a couple of times so I could present documents. This was a
> bit awkward with us occasionally having the wrong screen projected, and
> some dead time while we switched roles. It wasn't a show killer, but it
> make for some slightly awkward moments. We understand the issues a
> little better now, so we should be better prepared for tomorrow. My
> take away was that we don't really need two people to run the show.
> Rather we need one person with two screens. There is too much info to
> monitor it all on a single screen, but it isn't really that bad to
> monitor if you have two screens. I started monitoring both Steve's
> screen and mine, and it didn't seem that hard to follow the
> presentations and still monitor the webex. However, I only have one
> screen on my computer right now (no one seems to have brought a spare
> monitor) so I can't try running the show from a single computer.
>
>
>
> We did not get a chance to run any straw polls today, but we will
> tomorrow. Also, the room we are in only has bandwidth (and seating)
> provisioned for 75 people, and we were close to 100 at points. I wanted
> to pull everyone in the room onto the webex to see what would happen to
> the network but not everyone had access to the webex info, so we didn't
> try. I will post it more widely for tomorrow.
>
>
>
> Overall, we had one presenter who was fully remote. While they couldn't
> always get feedback from the crowd, overall I felt the presentation went
> well. It was very interactive, with dialogue from both the floor and
> the webex. We did some local presentations with substantial dialogue
> across the webex and from the floor and that worked well too. Everyone
> on the webex did a great job of sticking with the etiquettes we
> established. We used the chat window to request the floor, and it
> worked very well. A number of participants would send private messages
> to me. This was a bit un-nerving since you wanted to respond privately
> but were always a little concerned you'd accidently broadcast to
> everyone. Not that anything really need to be private, so in generally
> I'd encourage everyone to use the public chat and only send private
> messages when absolutely necessary.
>
>
>
> So we aren't done yet, but we seemed to have survived the first day
> okay. I'll provide incremental feedback as we go.
>
>
>
> Regards to all,
>
>
>
> Mat
>
>
>
> Matthew Sherman, Ph.D.
> Engineering Fellow
> BAE Systems - Network Systems (NS)
> Office: +1 973.633.6344
> Cell: +1 973.229.9520
> email: matthew.sherman@baesystems.com
>
>
>
>
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