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

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

Michael Froomkin wrote:

> 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.

I don't know the answer here either, and don't have a great way of solving
the problem.  But I can use the convenient heuristic of past meetings.  For
example, in MdR in November, there were 957 folks registered to attend in
person (<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/icann/la2000/archive/physpart.html>),
and about half that many could & actually did fit in the room at once.
(There were a significant number of no-shows, no doubt related to free
unlimited web registration.)  394 distinct non-anonymous people joined the
remote participation system on the day of the Public Forum
(<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/icann/la2000/archive/remotes-111500.html>),
and about half that many were watching the webcast at peak, as I recall.

If we thus estimate (conservatively) 400 in-person attendees and 200 online
folks, the two-to-one heuristic I consistently recommend to the Chair seems
pretty reasonable.

Note that it's then up to the chair to actually follow through on
recognizing that many remote participants -- which, as I've said before, can
be quite difficult for a bunch of reasons.  In particular, the Chair no
doubt senses the immediacy of hundreds of people who have paid thousands of
dollars each to attend -- and in that context it's surely tempting to ask
online folks to simply enter their comments into the web archive's record,
or to use the other online comment forum systems.  Again, I don't mean to
defend this approach -- I'll let its merits (which I actually think are in
some respects substantial and at the very least nontrivial, notwithstanding
its weaknesses) speak for themselves.

To be clear, then, my team's role (as I see it) ends with having comments
available for immediate display & reading, should the chair elect to take
online comments.  I consider it part of my role to periodically notify the
chair that such comments are available, but I certainly think I would be out
of line to (attempt to) "force" the chair to take such comments.  I'd be
curious to know if anyone here disagrees, or has advice re specific
procedures to follow when the recognition of remote comments falls below a
predetermined ratio.


> 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.

These are indeed serious concerns, and while my team thought about many of
these issues before suggesting the f-c-f-s approach, I agree that our
proposal fails to address the entirety of the potential problem here.

To the extent that the initial remote comments are substantially
duplicative, it might be in order for the remote participation liaison to
pass over the duplicate comments (perhaps after orally noting the presence
of the additional comments to the same effect, and their presence in the
online archive).

To the extent that the chair recognizes the problem and separates each queue
into multiple subqueues ("all folks wishing to speak about x, please come to
the head of the line"), that might also solve the problem.

Here's a possibility that might be of some assistance: When we know that a
listen-only presentation or presentation series will continue for some time,
perhaps the comment submission system should temporarily be closed?  This
would map to the social norm of "don't stand at the microphone when the
comment forum doesn't start for another half hour," and it might solve the
"previously-filled stale queue" problem you raised above.  (In fairness to
this proposal, I should also note its downside, though: It prevents
presubmission of comments a couple hours in advance, arguably disadvantaging
those with serious time-of-day constraints, and it perhaps causes some folks
to "forget" their question, though clearly they could readily temporarily
save it in a local file.  So I think it's probably a reasonable change, on
balance.)


> [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!]

I'll make a recommendation to Mr. Cerf, in his capacity as Chairman of the
Board of Directors, re how to choose remote comments to be recognized.  This
is ultimately in his court -- he'll direct the remote participation team.
But I expect he'll be amenable to whatever reasonable solution is ultimately
selected.



Finally, to respond to Harald's comments: As Harald noted, the "web form
comment submission system" is definitely sub-optimal for any kind of
interactive discussion.  But, in my experience, while some sessions
(especially the GA) tend to contain periods of back-and-forth discussion,
the presentation-and-comment model best describes the overall ICANN meeting
framework, including even the "General Comments" session at the end of a
Public Forum (in which the Board receives at most one comment from each
participant, but not more than one).  So, for the purpose of the GA's
sessions, perhaps the rule should be "one comment per person per topic,
except when during a 'discussion,' in which case multiple comments will be
accepted and queued, subject to a background consideration that those who
haven't spoken yet should get a preference."


-Ben Edelman, going to sleep!

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