Re: [ga] RE: Selecting Comments to Read Aloud

["Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law" <froomkin@law.miami.edu>]

This is a noble try, but I think it has flaws, some quite serious.  [Any
chance, by the way, of following up on the suggestion made earlier in one
of these threads that the place where change is most needed is comments to
the Board rather than the GA?  I think that commentator was right!]

First, it doesn't address the balance issue: what should the ratio of
online to offline speakers be.  Should the quotas be relative to numbers
present? Time?  I honestly don't know what the right answer is here -
which is one reason why I like putting everone into the same pot.

Second, first-come-first-serve has some trivialization dangers.  Imagine a
meeting in which the panel/board/whatever speak for 40 minutes than take
comments for 20.  Now imagine you are using two FCFS systems, one in which
people queue at a microphone, and another the online system you propose.  
The people who queue at the microphone can edit their remarks to focus on
the most important thing, and also not repeat something said after the
time they started to queue.  The people who submit an online query have it
preserved in amber. 

Third, it still doesn't align the incentives - what I really want is to
make the people in the room's interest the same as the people online,
rather than to make them adverse.

On Mon, 19 Feb 2001, Ben Edelman wrote:

> 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.)

Speakers are not limited by time (much); offline comments are usually
limited by length.  Worse -- much, much worse -- they are frequently
edited by the person who reads them.  This is actually a quite separate
and serious problem, since substance is often lost in this process and the
readers' ideas of what matters are not always the same as the writers'.

> 
> Our sense is that there's more than one way to achieve such consistency.

I hope this is right.

> 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,

The problem is the 'comments in amber' problem.

> 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.)
> 
> 

Slashdot anyone?

> 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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