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

[Sotiropoulos <sotiris@hermesnetwork.com>]

Ben Edelman wrote:
>
> Now that I better understand your suggestion, some further responses:
> 
> * My "distraction" comment from the prior message stands, and I stand by it
> even more forcefully than I did in the prior instance, even as I understand
> that you are not convinced by this reasoning.  

Ben, I will make cause with Joanna on this one. 
Your reasoning is your own, and you've a right to
it, no doubt.  However, I disagree with your
position, and I fully support Joanna's proposal,
seconding her motion/move/whatever.  I think it's
an excellent idea, and one that should be (and
ultimately, will be) put into practice, to one
degree or another.  There's plenty of ways to do
this, which will also ensure widespread
participation and interest in the proceedings. 
This *is* the Internet we're dealing with here... 
If the pattern holds, opinions/questions will
probably be put forward by those bold enough to
pipe up on the text chat.  I conjecture that it
may indeed be possible to conduct an orderly
remote text chat participation, and there's still
plenty of time to examine the options.  At least,
we should be open-minded.  Also, think of the
positive publicity of just giving it a shot! 
Surely ICANN could use some inspiring news?

>Again, based on prior
> experience, when I did this in multiple prior meetings, I believe this is
> distracting to at least some attendees.

Ben, the truth is, that much more is at stake than
a few audience-seats in an auditorium.  

>There's just something different
> about an in-person meeting (where the usual norm is to concentrate on the
> one person talking) versus a webcast via computer (where the medium seems to
> call out for multiple means of participation).

Which is why we must incorporate every means at
hand to foster participation, education, and
outreach as much as we're able.  I believe it is
possible to work out a schema which could include
what Joanna has proposed. This gesture would go a
long way, believe it.
 
> * The chat room really isn't intended to be a place of substantive,
> on-the-record deliberation.  The introduction text viewed upon entrance to
> the chat room says so pretty clearly.  And much of the discussion in the
> chat rooms, in my experience (and as the logs reflect), is quite
> nonsubstasntive.  

Again, Ben, this is your opinion.  If there are
others who agree with you, let them come forward
and speak on it.  I, myself, agree with Joanna's
perspective and not yours.

>I'm not anxious to project chat room comments re audio
> problems, login problems, and the other various glitches that some folks
> experience at various points in the meeting; it just doesn't seem helpful to
> the work at hand.

Perhaps we could find ways and means that would
share out the burden?  Mayhap such avenues should
be explored? 

> 
> * I'm concerned that the stream-of-consciousness tone of the chat room isn't
> appropriate in the setting of the in-person public meeting.  Furthermore,
> general and enduring display of such messages might cause the in-person
> participants not to take remote participants seriously. 

Again, your opinion, unless others speak up. 
There are ways to circumvent possible misuse or
treatment of this option, including active weeding
of the forum.  Such a schema could easily be
devised within the telephony program firetalk with
its rather remarkable remote forum capacities. (I
was actually a witness to their first official
firetalk welcome forum, at which there was an
audience of up to 500 persons at a time, all
listening to the speakers, and having the
possibility of engaging in text chat with one
another, as well as the ability to send questions
to the presenting panel.  Of course, none of the
audience had speaking privileges.  The event was a
flying success!  I was a participant, so I am
telling you all that I experienced this first
hand.)  Anyway, I have contacted one of the
functionaries from the company and they would be
interested in exploring the issue, should anybody
here be interested in coordinating.

> Instead, I think
> remote participation might be better received if remote participants
> contributed occasional well-thought-out comments, rather than continuing
> marginally-on-topic banter, for lack of a better word, which truly has been
> my experience in prior meetings.  (That is, in my experience, the chat room
> comments often stray from the discussion in the in-person meeting, and I'm
> not sure that's helpful on balance.)  Ultimately, the chat room just doesn't
> seem consistent to me with the tone of a public meeting, with the tone of
> the speakers at the microphone, and with the expectations of those attending
> the meetings in person.

I'm unsure as to why you keep speaking about the
"expectations of those attending
the meetings in person" as a cause for trepidation
in an overall move toward a  more inclusive
process.  Does it really come down to auditorium
comfort?
 
> * On some occasions, we've had some pretty serious violations of chat room
> policy -- personal attacks, flames, obscene comments, etc.  I've never had
> to ask anyone to leave the chat room, nor to remove anyone using the
> technical means at my disposal, but I've come close (issuing "this is your
> second and final warning" messages).  

The firetalk system would allow us to cut out this
element entirely, and still be able to present
effective "real-time" participation efforts from a
significantly wider audience.  I would be more
than interested in exploring its application with
you.  

>Again, this sort of thing isn't
> appropriate for display to the general audience, and neither would it be
> helpful in that context.  It's all fully & publicly archived if anyone is
> interested, but projecting it just doesn't make sense to me.

Oh, and I fully agree... 
 
> 2) Re increased fairness and even-handedness in selecting remote comments.
> 
> Your comments here, as well as Kendall's, raise a serious set of questions,
> to which I hope to reply at some length, pending further discussion among my
> team, as well as other personal obligations (other work to be done!) and
> some further investigation re our technical capabilities.  That said, here's
> what immediately comes to mind.
> 
> You wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Certainly I don't think of the current selection process as "manipulation,"
> so I think some commentary is in order here.
> 
> When in November 1998 I first wrote the code that is the basis of the remote
> participation system still in place today, my goal was simple: to take
> public comments, in real-time, in a way that hadn't been possible at the
> IFWP meetings that preceded ICANN's formation.  It seemed immediately clear
> to me that we'd get more online comments than we'd have time to read, and
> indeed this proved true in every ICANN meeting.  But simply reading the
> first few comments was clearly an unacceptable methodology; after all, that
> would encourage a race to submit comments as early as possible, clearly (I
> thought) an undesirable outcome.
> 
> In response to concern about how to select questions to answer, two
> significant systems were put in place: First, a "meeting section" selection
> box -- in which users would self-classify their comments to map to agenda
> items on a drop-down list.  The "ask a question" screen clearly reports
> which section is currently in progress, and the Remote Participation Liaison
> chooses comments for a particular section's Audience Q&A session exclusively
> from the comments marked for that section.  

All of this can be done much more efficiently in a
firetalk forum.  I appreciate your structure, and
I think we can effectively apply it to
firetalk.    

Second, a Remote Participation
> Liaison was carefully selected and trained -- in the first instance by
> Jonathan Zittrain, the Berkman Center faculty member working on the Center's
> initial remote participation efforts -- to select comments solely for their
> clarity and relevance to current discussion, but not for a particular
> substantive position, one way or the other.  That's not to say that our
> efforts on that front have been successful in every instance -- I imagine
> there are plenty of allegations that they have not! -- but it was certainly
> our goal, I hope pretty clearly articulated in the documentation &
> instructions for the remote participation system.
> 
> Kendall suggested an interesting alternative way to select comments -- some
> variation of a vote by online participants.  I'm still investigating the
> feasibility & practicality of doing so, as well as other concerns like fraud
> control, perceived fairness, etc.  Again, a response on all this is
> forthcoming.

I will continue to maintain that firetalk can
solve all of these issues.
 
> 3) Accepting remote comments in advance of the start of the meeting.
> 
> You wrote:
> 
> > ... I would think about requesting some questions and comments through
> > the GA list, submitted in advance.
> 
> We have considered this in the past, but have ultimately concluded that it's
> not the best way to proceed. ICANN and the DNSO maintain numerous methods
> of receiving comments from online participants in non-real-time contexts --
> public mailing lists (including this one), the ICANN public comment boards,
> messages sent directly to staff, Board Members, NC members, constituency
> representatives, etc.  It's certainly not the intention of the webcast
> efforts to replace or compete with any of these systems, and we don't seek
> to do so.  Accordingly, our rule, since the November 1998 meetings, has been
> to accept only real-time (not presubmitted) comments.  In practice we'll
> accept any comment meeting the length requirement (less than 1000
> characters -- roughly the amount we can display on a single projection
> screen in a large font) and have no way of knowing when a remote participant
> actually drafted the comment.  But the responsibility is on the remote
> participant to submit a comment during the meeting if it is to be treated as
> a comment submitted to the meeting itself, as distinguished from the
> non-realtime comment-receiving systems.

A firetalk forum would allow much more flexibility
in all of these circumstances and must be
seriously considered.
 
> For whatever it's worth, this is (as best I can remember) the first time
> I've received this comment, i.e. the suggestion that presubmitted comments
> should be accepted along with "live remote participant" comments.  My sense
> previously was that everyone thought it was a good idea to require that
> comments be submitted during the meetings; no one has ever said otherwise.
> 
> > 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.
> 
> I'm a little confused about what you mean here.  I think you may be
> confusing the live chat room (an "IRC chat," like an AOL chat room or some
> such) with the remote comment submission system (web forms that submit text
> to a database).  Our remote participation liaison can readily review all
> messages in the database, can mark messages for (one-button) display on the
> projection screen, can classify messages according to a variety of criteria
> (whether or not read yet, meeting section if not so classified by the
> submitter, etc.), and can generally keep pretty good track of what's going
> on.  I'd like to think that we do know quite well what's going to hit the
> screen next!  

Absolutely no argument from me on that wise.  But
unwarranted censorship of any kind must be guarded
against.

>(Indeed, each comment is displayed on-screen while it's
> read -- as the scribe's notes generally reflect, i.e. "remote comment #1234
> from Tom Smith read in its entirety and displayed on screen" might be
> entered into scribe's notes when that is the case).
> 
> In terms of fairness and evenhandedness, I understand the concern here, and
> agree that it's a serious one.  But please understand the other issues we
> also face here: For example, I hope you appropriately consider the concern I
> expressed in my last message about reading & presenting off-topic messages
> (perhaps "stale" -- read too late, i.e. after the topic in question was
> discussed by the meeting -- or perhaps inherently off-topic).  Doing so
> causes the audience to literally cringe, in my experience, as if to say "Why
> are those Berkman Center people so dumb as to read us a question about
> *that*, when we just finished discussing it, and were all quite tired of the
> topic after such a prolonged discussion of the subject?"  

This is a problem of the past, not the future. 
let us move forward and explore what is readily
available now.

>For this reason,
> and for others too (ad hominem attacks, questions not appropriately
> addressed to the current meeting or group, messages submitted from what
> immediately seem to be false identities, etc.), we've come to think that any
> automated way of selecting comments is likely to be undesirable for other
> reasons, notwithstanding the underlying desirability of an automated way of
> choosing messages to be read aloud.  Again, I look forward to responding to
> Kendall's suggestion on this subject, and so I'd propose to bracket this
> discussion for the moment.

Not for long, I hope.
 
> > 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.
> 
> Certainly any effort to increase GA participation both in the GA's physical
> meeting and in other ICANN sessions seems to me highly desirable, and I
> applaud such attempts.
> 
> If these attempts are successful and lead to insightful and clearly-stated
> questions closely related to the topics under discussion on the various
> meeting agendas, I'm confident that the remote participation liaison will
> properly present these messages to the assembled group.
> 
> My sense in prior meetings has been that, in general, the liaison is usually
> successful in presenting a reasonable range of messages, giving appropriate
> recognition to major topic areas of the submitted questions and reading a
> substantial portion of the messages received.  I know that there have been
> instances when this has not been the case -- when public comment (both
> in-person and via remote participation) has been cut short due to shortness
> of time, or when the meeting chair has used his or her prerogative to
> recognize disproportionately many in-person commenters.  (Incidentally, I do
> continue to believe remains a significant factor to keep in mind -- the
> assembled group, and the queue at the microphone, can prove quite a force to
> be reckoned with, given their physical presence, travel expenses incurred,
> and general immediacy, especially as against a seemingly invisible and
> distant online audience.  I continue to suggest to the chair of each meeting
> that a remote comment be recognized after every two microphone comments, and
> at times we've gotten into an excellent rhythm this way.  But the underlying
> issue surely remains.)

I'm sorry, but which "underlying issue" do you
mean here exactly?
 
> 4) Increased reliance on multimedia participation, perhaps via 6-10 folks
> selected to participate in some special way for the occasion.
> 
> You wrote:
> 
> > ... 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.
> 
> Can you propose a specific technical means (hardware and software) for doing
> so?  At the moment I'm a bit unclear on what specifically you're talking
> about -- videoconferencing, or something else.

Firetalk.
 
> How would we choose the 6-10 contributors?  No one gets a similarly-favored
> position in the physical meeting, so I'd be concerned that this approach
> might not receive the support of physical meeting attendees.

Vote?
 
> Again, I thank everyone on this list for their suggestions.  I remain
> interested in further comments -- everything from improving the wording of
> web pages announcement emails to more far-reaching comments like the ideas
> submitted so far.  I certainly can't promise that the Berkman Center will do
> everything that's suggested here -- but we're listening, and, we think,
> thinking seriously about these issues.

That's what we're asking you to do... listen.  We
certainly hope you will seriously consider all
viable options.  I have experienced the remote
participation during Yokohama, and I know it is
possible to do it better.  


Sincerely,

Sotiris Sotiropoulos
	Hermes Network, Inc.
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