RE: [ga] Draft of Bylaws Recommendation concerning the General Assembly

["Joanna Lane" <jo-uk@rcn.com>]

Ben,
Thank you. I do appreciate that telling somebody else how to run a live
transmission by remote from several thousand miles away is probably the best
way to drive the person on the ground to distraction and end up with a worse
result than if you had let them do it without interference. Believe me, I
have the T-shirt, so please bear in mind that I am not suggesting radical
changes without adequate preparation time. Nevertheless, 4 weeks
pre-production is sheer luxury for most live transmissions and I'd like to
think the time could be used productively to make some basic improvements
and test the system with plenty of time for the Liaison team to feel
comfortable about new elements. With luck, some suggestions could even make
your life easier.

Ben Edelman wrote:-
>I understand you to make two specific suggestions.  First, that each
real-time comments received should be displayed on a large screen for a
brief period of time.<

The principle is that remote participation should not be manipulated
unnecessarily as this gives false feedback to those in the public auditorium
about the nature and extent of online commentary. Therefore, I'm suggesting
that a large screen displays a direct feed from the chat room terminal, so
that comments roll through as they are posted. If noone posts for a while,
the screen will remain static. If everyone has something to say at the same
time, there will be a flurry.  People in the online chat room are responding
to each other as well as to the speakers and to edit them out of context is
to affect their meaning.

>(I take it that you propose this display to take
place while the rest of the meeting continues,>

Yes, that's vital. If there are twenty posts of  "I agree", it's important
to keep the relationship between speaker and commentary in sync. I have
already discussed reasons for building in a short delay, but this should be
kept to the minimum.

>and that you further propose
continuing the existing system of recognizing some remote comments along
with audience questions, reading comments out loud in their entirety, and
allowing the Board / NC to respond.) >

Yes, but I would think about requesting some questions and comments through
the GA list, submitted in advance. If not, you have the task of selecting
questions on the fly, while trying to ensure a fair and even handed input,
without knowing what's going to hit the screen next, or when you're going to
get a decent comment to read out.  This is not a trivial matter.

We could aim for consensus in the GA as to the topics that need highlighting
in this way. Questions could be supplemented or even substituted by live
comments on the day if desirable, but it would give the online participation
some much needed structure and ensure quality questions are heard on a wide
range of topics at agreed points in the schedule, interwoven with those from
the audience (some of which I'm sure are prepared in advance).  I'd be very
surprised if a call for questions did not receive a very positive response
from the GA list over say a 2 week period.


>Second, that, to the extent possible,
remote participation via various multimedia systems should be considered.<

- Yes, but not in the way you are suggesting. Further comments below.


>These are both proposals Berkman Center team has in fact considered in the
past, so I'd like to begin by explaining the reasons why we have previously
decided against these methods.  For the first, we were concerned that the
text comments might be distracting -- hard to concentrate on as the meeting
continued.  When we nonetheless tested the system briefly (in Singapore in
particular, but also in Berlin and Santiago), this intuition was supported
by a casual survey of a few random attendees, a couple of whom commented to
me that they disliked being forced to choose between remote participant
comments and listening to the speakers in the room.  Personally, I was also
concerned that giving remote participants "screen time" in this way might
reduce the amount of "mic time" devoted to their comments, a tradeoff that
to me seemed on balance most likely undesirable.  On the whole, then, my
experience here was ultimately negative; I was led to favor more regimented
reading of comments out loud, as well as comprehensive posting of an archive
of all comments received.>

- The idea is to put all participants onto a level playing field at the same
event as far as is practicable. Don't forget that remote participants are
watching the speaker as well as reading and typing the comments, and I don't
hear them complaining. Generally, people are remarkably good at
multi-tasking and I would caution against privileged attendees denying a
proper means of participation to the vast majority of the GA. In short, we
have to make it work. This is not a choice.

First, it depends entirely on how text is presented as to whether or not it
works with other elements. This needs careful consideration as to form, size
and position. I would need more detail to address possible problems you have
experienced with the last two, but I have already dealt with form in the
paragraph above and believe this will merge seamlessly, driven as it is by
the event and not by some arbitrary editing.

Second, what is one man's distraction is another man's vital piece of
information. Third, television combines these elements successfully all the
time. A simple example is CNNs The Spin Room.  Finally on this point, I
would like to ask the couple of people who didn't like being forced to chose
between text comments and listening to speakers why they couldn't do both.
Was it that they couldn't see both at the same time, or was it the kind of
problem some people have with foreign films and subtitles.

>Your second suggestion was of increased multimedia participation, in
particular "live picture and sound."  You may recall that the Berkman Center
experimented with such techniques in our November 1999 "ICANN: Pressing
Issues" workshop just before the ICANN LA meetings in 1999; in those
workshops, we videoconferenced in both Professor Michael Froomkin and
Professor Tamar Frankel, from their respective schools. >
But while quality
was generally acceptable, it was weak enough to be distracting at times.
Furthermore, I know of no videoconferencing solution that scales
sufficiently well to accommodate dozens (or hundreds!) of simultaneous
remote participants; to the best of my knowledge, the technology just isn't
there yet.

- ROFL. I can just imagine a 40 ft high video wall behind the speaker with
4000 members all talking at once...Noooo!
This idea does not scale, so you can forget about that aspect, but it has
great value as a device to act as a bridge between a speaker in person and
the remote text participation.

I regret I wasn't actually around for the 1999 workshop, but it sounds like
a good idea failed because you had a small tech problem. Yes, ideas need to
be backed up by high production values and poor technical quality can ruin
even the most brilliant ideas. I have that T shirt as well.
The solution is to fix the tech problem and have another go. Also, two
contributors are not sufficient in number to establish this format as part
of the process, hence it is easily reduced to an irritant in the
proceedings. My suggestion would be to have 6-10 contributors, as the
schedule allows, either interwoven at regular intervals or introduced as a
block, but all using the same screen, speaking individually in rotation.

If it is decided to use the same screen as the text screen, rather than a
separate screen, this would disconnect access to text comments during those
particular sections, but selected online comments could still be read out at
the mic. If that's the favored way, then it might be a good idea to agree
the time for these questions is scheduled in advance.


<Finally, while we've considered simple (non-realtime) systems,
i.e. "upload your FTP AVI, MOV, MPEG, or RM file to this server, and we'll
play it for the attendees," my sense was that this just wasn't an
appropriate method for participation in ICANN meetings -- felt too scripted,
and like it might give too great an advantage to those with greater
resources (i.e. a video production infrastructure and staff).  So, after
some consideration, we previously decided against this method too.>

- I'm not surprised. I wouldn't worry too much about advantages of video
production infrastructure. A bad idea is always a bad idea, however it is
dressed up. However, I agree with you 100% that it's not an appropriate
method for participation to introduce pre-recorded segments at this event.
It would be introducing a structural flaw. This is a live event, not a
recorded event and in effect, inserting a recording serves only to confuse
people and stall the momentum of the live event. There would always be a
question mark over whether the person would have said something different if
they had heard what had just gone before. An example of this effect can be
found in the recorded acceptance speeches at the Academy Awards. Every time
they show one, the event crashes to a halt. Something to be avoided.


I will leave my comments at that for now.
Best wishes,
Joanna

<Notwithstanding these results of prior consideration of your suggestions,
I'd be interested to hear the GA's thoughts on the validity of this
reasoning and sense of whether these proposals in fact would be helpful.  I
also remain interested in additional suggestions, large and small, which I
can at least promise our team will carefully consider.>


To respond to Roberto's comments ("coordination between Berkman folks and
the Chair") -- some explanation of the system currently in place and what I
recall going wrong in November 2000: For tech-chair communications purposes,
we place a computer terminal in front of the meeting chair, allowing two-way
text communication between the Chair and meeting technical staff.  We use
this system to alert the chair to pending remote comments, to remind the
chair of announcements to be made, etc., and we can also cause the computer
to "ding" (play a brief bell-like sound) to get the chair's attention.  As I
recall MdR, this system was in fact working properly; the problem we faced
there was that the remote participation system was not intended to provide
fast enough responses (nor to receive sufficient volume) to accommodate
voting by online folks, and neither was our staff prepared to tally and
present votes on ~10-15 seconds notice (especially difficult because of the
lag of RealAudio -- the webcast audience being at least 15 seconds, and
sometimes as many as 30 seconds, behind the assembled group -- meaning our
team's "vote report" was consistently too late to be useful).  The GA has
never "formally" asked the Berkman Center to provide a real-time voting
system, and I'm not sure we'd be able to provide one in the 3-4 weeks that
remain.  But I believe it was this issue that caused the problem at issue
here -- no fault of the webcast infrastructure itself, and most certainly no
fault of Roberto's.


Ben Edelman
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Harvard Law School


> -----Original Message-----
> From: jo-uk@rcn.com [mailto:jo-uk@rcn.com]
> Sent: Saturday, February 10, 2001 1:31 AM
> To: dassa@dhs.org; ga@dnso.org
> Cc: edelman@law.harvard.edu
> Subject: RE: [ga] Draft of Bylaws Recommendation concerning the General
> Assembly
>
>
> Ben,
> Thank you for your enlightening post. Time is short now, so I'll be brief.
> If you can get rid of  - "Of course, not every message can be read or
> displayed.", you'll be half way to solving the problem IMO.
>
> I agree with Dassa that we should consider forwarding all comments as they
> are made online. Ideally, Liason needs about a 20 second delay between
> receiving the real time posts and screening to the public arena.
> That would
> allow sufficient time to pick up on any real abuse and temporarily
> disconnect, hopefully not crashing in the process, but freezing the screen
> in the public arena, cutting the offensive post, then unfreezing.
> I would be
> most interested to know if the technology exists to do this.
>
> Of course, we could achieve a better balance of input all-round
> by offering
> at least some remote participation by live picture and sound.
>
> Sincerely,
> Joanna
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-ga@dnso.org [mailto:owner-ga@dnso.org]On Behalf Of Dassa
> Sent: Friday, February 09, 2001 9:08 PM
> To: ga@dnso.org
> Subject: RE: [ga] Draft of Bylaws Recommendation concerning the General
> Assembly
>
>
> This is only a quick thought on the matter and may not be
> practical but has
> any consideration been given to having the remote participant comments and
> questions displayed on a large projector screen within the room
> to allow all
> those present to see the comments etc in real time as they are
> posted?  Then
> they can be thought about within the context of the discussion
> and raised by
> someone inhouse if relevent.
>
> Darryl (Dassa) Lynch.
>
> |>-----Original Message-----
> |>From: owner-ga@dnso.org [mailto:owner-ga@dnso.org]On Behalf Of Ben
> |>Edelman
> |>Sent: Saturday, February 10, 2001 11:41 AM
> |>To: ga@dnso.org
> |>Subject: RE: [ga] Draft of Bylaws Recommendation concerning
> |>the General
> |>Assembly
> |>
> |>
> |>Joanna Lane wrote:
> |>
> |>> ...
> |>> I'd like to see the wording strengthened to give online
> |>> participants equal rights to participate and vote.
> |>
> |>I'd appreciate some guidance from the folks on the list re
> |>what specific
> |>steps to take to give additional influence to online
> |>participants.  To date,
> |>I generally advise the chair of a session (Chair of the GA,
> |>Chair of the
> |>Names Council, or Chairman of the Board of ICANN) that "in the past, a
> |>successful way of recognizing remote participants has been to take two
> |>questions from the in-room microphone, then one from remote
> |>participants."
> |>
> |>Indeed, this often works well, and when we establish such a
> |>rhythm, we are
> |>most successful (in my estimation, and I think the archives
> |>reflect this) at
> |>recognizing remote participants.
> |>
> |>
> |>However, it's a highly imperfect system.  For example, when a remote
> |>participants' comment is a bit out of date or otherwise off-topic with
> |>respect to the current discussion, I have on occasion sensed
> |>some tension in
> |>the room, i.e. that the folks physically present in the
> |>meeting would prefer
> |>to continue discussion with the current topic, and are
> |>disappointed to be
> |>interrupted by the remote participants' comment.  I believe
> |>this factor can
> |>be especially strong when a meeting is short of time or when there's
> |>otherwise tension in the room.  When this tension arises, I'm
> |>confident that
> |>the chair feels it too, and the inevitable response is to
> |>reduce subsequent
> |>recognition of remote comments in favor of additional comments from
> |>in-person attendees.
> |>
> |>I'd be pleased to alter the text on the remote participation
> |>system in order
> |>to better advise remote participants how to submit the most effective
> |>comments, so as to get the most helpful response.  Alternatively, I'd
> |>happily consider some more fundamental change to the remote
> |>participation
> |>system, subject to constraints of implementation time and complexity,
> |>expected reliability, simplicity, perceived fairness, etc.
> |>
> |>
> |>The relevant wording on the current version of the "Remote
> |>Participation
> |>Comment Submission Form" is as follows:
> |>
> |>"Use this form to submit real-time comments to the physical
> |>meeting room in
> |>Melbourne.
> |>
> |>Messages sent though this form will be sent directly to the Remote
> |>Participation Liaison in the meeting room. The Liaison will review and
> |>screen these messages; some messages will be read aloud,
> |>while others will
> |>displayed on projection screens. Of course, not every message
> |>can be read or
> |>displayed.
> |>
> |>Therefore, it is important that real-time comments be clear
> |>and concise, and
> |>relevant to the topic currently being discussed. The idea is
> |>that messages
> |>sent in real time should be treated like comments made at the
> |>microphones in
> |>the meeting room. For that same reason, it's not a good idea
> |>to send lengthy
> |>prepared comments using the real-time comment system;
> |>instead, use ICANN's
> |>Public Comment Forum for comments written in advance of the
> |>start of the
> |>meeting. Finally, note that each comment submission is limited to 1000
> |>characters, and no more than one comment will be considered
> |>from each remote
> |>participant on each topic under consideration -- just like in
> |>the meeting
> |>room itself. We will also attempt to give preference to those remote
> |>commenters who have not already participated."
> |>
> |>
> |>
> |>Ben Edelman
> |>
> |>--
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