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

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

Joanna,

Thanks for the suggestions.

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.  (I take it that you propose this display to take
place while the rest of the meeting continues, 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.)  Second, that, to the extent possible,
remote participation via various multimedia systems should be considered.

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.

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.  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.


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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