[ga] RE: Selecting Comments to Read Aloud

["Ben Edelman" <edelman@law.harvard.edu>]

Professor Froomkin's 2/16 comments ("everyone, including the people
physically present, should have to submit comments via the 'remote' system")
got the Berkman Center remote participation team thinking again about ideal
methods of recognizing remote participants.

In principle, we are (and always have been) in agreement with Froomkin's
call for consistency between in-person and remote comments -- and we'd like
to think the existing remote participation at least makes reasonable efforts
on this front.  (For example, just as each in-person participant is asked to
limit herself to one comment per agenda item, so too do we ask the same of
online participants.)

Our sense is that there's more than one way to achieve such consistency.
Froomkin suggested one approach -- but we certainly don't think it's the
only possibility.  Instead, we'd suggest an increasing reliance on
first-come-first-served among remote participants' comments.  When coupled
with the one-comment-per-topic-per-participant rule (and our underlying
fraud detection systems), we think we can most likely implement this rule
without too seriously skewing incentives.  (In principle, we'd be worried
that first-come-first-served would encourage participants to compete in
submitting their comments as early as possible.)  Of course,
first-come-first-served has its necessary limits: We'll continue to screen
for non-substantive submissions as well as for submissions not related to
the current topic of the meeting; these comments will be included in the web
archive but, we think, should not be considered for presentation to the
assembled group.  Furthermore, if the chair should at some point call for
questions or comments on a particular limited subject, we'd favor remote
submissions on that topic, just as folks queued at a microphone would yield
to someone intending to speak in person on the specified subject.

Again, I'm interested to hear what folks on the list thing of this
alternative approach.


(The more we thought about voting, as contemplated by my last post with this
same subject line, the more concerned we became that, whatever the merits of
voting, it just didn't map to a practice used in the in-person meeting.  So,
despite its initial, we ultimately came to think that voting just wasn't
appropriate in this context.)


Finally, it's been suggested that some participants (for example, non-native
speakers) might prefer to ask questions in writing (via a computer terminal)
rather than at a microphone.  This is a very reasonable suggestion --
indeed, one first (to my knowledge) made by Professor Zittrain at the ICANN
meeting in Singapore in March 1999, where he asked me to provide a computer
terminal for that purpose.  We continued to do so in Berlin (see picture at
<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/mmarchive/ICANN_Berlin/Meeting/
Comments%2Ejpg>) and have done so sporadically since then; interest seemed
to be relatively low, and so we didn't make this a priority.  However, in
MdR in Nov 2000, we did have three such terminals in place -- one in each of
the two overflow rooms in the hotel basement (overflow rooms not heavily
used, however), and one on the far side of the front of the room (near the
audience microphone) that was unfortunately generally taken over by folks
checking their email, etc.  I've made a note to do better in Melbourne -- to
see to it that the terminal remains dedicated to this purpose, and that it's
well-publicized on the projection screen between meetings.



Ben Edelman

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