______________________________________________________________________ DRAFT TRANSCRIPT Session: APNIC Member Meeting Date: Friday 3 March 2006 Time: 4.00pm Open mic ______________________________________________________________________ PAUL WILSON: We've still got a bit of time before the scheduled close of the meeting so I'll open the microphone again for any more comments or discussion or questions about anything at all of vague interest or vague relevance to the meeting we've just had. KUO-WEI WU: When will we talk about the next meeting? PAUL WILSON: We will be announcing the next meeting in just a second. I just thought I'd pad it out with another open microphone. BILL NORTON: There's one other topic that comes up in some of the other forums. This is Bill Norton from Equinix. And that has to do with this room that we're sitting in right here. How many folks are listening to what I'm saying versus staring down at their laptops typing away, now I have their attention. I bring up the point because I remember back in the earlier days of NANOG before we had wireless access, there was pretty close to full attention to the speakers at the time and as soon as wireless came in, there was a great distraction to the audience, which was their day job, their e-mail, their chat, maybe the presentation that they're going to be working on for a different conference in e-mailing all kinds of stuff. So one of the things that's always been tossed around was should there be wireless access during the presentation time or might the presenters who put time into putting their thoughts together deserve to have the full attention during the time that they're presenting, at least for a little while. RANDY BUSH: Randy Bush, IIJ. I have a saying from my childhood - "What keeps the cows inside the pasture is the quality of the grass, not the height of the fence." LAUGHTER APPLAUSE BILL WOODCOCK: I don't think - just speaking as someone else in the North American region - that it counts as tossing an idea round if nobody catches it when you throw it, Bill. BILL NORTON: OK then! LAUGHTER I've heard that, Randy, many times from you and it's just as funny the first time as it is the last time. LAUGHTER Except the last time. That's right, Randy. However. I would point out, though, that presenters often need at least a few minutes of attention to capture the interest of the people in the audience that are being distracted by something that is definitely of interest to the audience. So I understand your statement about the grass, but this is a mighty interesting distraction. KUO-WEI WU: I think the people here is multitasking. Don't worry about it. LAUGHTER PAUL WILSON: Should we do another straw poll just to check the level of interest in this question and also so that Sam can take a couple of shots of people with their hands up which she's been wanting to do for a while. BILL NORTON: If you're going to do a straw poll, I think you ought to maybe have a few options that people could consider as opposed to just shutting the wireless off during the conference or not providing it. There's another option, a midpoint option, which might be that, during a select period of time, the wireless is enabled, during the entire conference, the wireless is enabled but outside of the rooms, or some geographic regions where they work just fine. The suggestion was to use SSIDs to r as a way to solve that problem. But you understand the point. PAUL WILSON: The stenography has stopped with all the chat off the mic. RANDY BUSH: Is that bad? PAUL WILSON: It is, Randy. There are people out there watching it. Could I have a show of hands for anyone who's interested in reducing wireless access at the meeting in any way, shape or form, for the sake of Bill's quite interesting - RANDY BUSH: Randy Bush, IIJ. I would note that a significant number of people have already done so by their use of BitTorrent. PAUL WILSON: Have you been snooping on the network, Randy? RANDY BUSH: I was wondering where the bandwidth went. BitTorrent users should have been blocked yesterday morning. PAUL WILSON: OK. Who has got some interest in reducing in some way the wireless access in order that speakers have a fair hearing? (Pause) How many of you are speakers? LAUGHTER APPLAUSE And who would support the status quo? Now, just keep your hand up so the photographer has - RANDY BUSH: You will be identified and taken care of later. LAUGHTER I'd say the idea isn't completely dead but I think some of the people who are motivated to do so might want to come back to the meeting with something more like a proposals. RANDY BUSH: Bill Woodcock pointed out that that was just the largest show of hands that we've ever seen in an APNIC poll. LAUGHTER BILL NORTON: I will just comment that what we saw here just now is consistent with the discussion and what we heard from other operations forums, but I still think we have some issue there. The fact that the presenters are not seeing faces looking up at them - I don't know. Something tells me that we have something - this turns into a huge terminal room, in effect. PAUL WILSON: Maybe it should be the presenter's option. The presenter should be able to turn the switch. GEOFF HUSTON: As a presenter, if you're going to do it this way, I want an MRTG display of the amount of traffic on the wireless, so at least I know how much e-mail is going on and I can speak more loudly or whatever is required to try and get the line down again. So can I have some real-time feedback as to how boring I am at that time. APPLAUSE RANDY BUSH: At NANOG two or three years ago, we took that very graph and put what talk was going on at the time and gave it to the program committee so that they might have a little better judge of which talks worked and which didn't. SURESH RAMASUBRAMANIAN: I would say I had a lot of people doing e-mail in my track but I also had speakers mobbed with questions, and, after in the coffee break, they were mobbed with questions. So I don't see that there's correlation between the two. People will always be doing e-mail and Woody is doing lots of typing while listening to everything I'm saying, I'm sure and so is everybody else. So, with all due respect to Randy, I don't think there's much correlation between the two right now. MA YAN: It's a more common practice. At more and more international conferences, wireless is available so, in extreme cases, if we block something, then at least the APNIC website should be blocked. People can download the materials and share information and at least internal information, e-mail system, should not be blocked anyway. A lot of discussion - even people are talking about online, then a lot of information sharing online, internal discussion regarding presentation should be promoted, I suppose. At least. RANDY BUSH: And then there's the Jabber participants. JORDI PALET: I think it's a question of self-responsibility. Self-responsibility covers who is paying your expenses to come to the conference. I also feel that it will not be good to disable the connectivity because I am sure most of us need to be also taking care - maybe not doing all the day but at least being able to access our remote servers or whatever when something happens, especially when you are operating networks. And maybe not offering the connectivity will even drop the attendance because some of the companies may be so small that they cannot simultaneously have people participating and taking care of the responsibilities. We all have things to do and I don't really think having wireless means for everyone not being able to do both things at the same time or more or less. I usually don't look too much at the slides but I am really taking care of my e-mail not 100% of the time, but I am really capturing what the speaker is saying and I am sure a lot of people is doing so. But, at the end, as I said at the beginning, it's a question of self-responsibility. PAUL WILSON: Let's give Bill the last word on this. BILL NORTON: Sure. I guess the - I go back and forth on the issue myself. On the other side, it's possible that this technology that we all have in front of us, laptops and the wireless and access to the net, could be exploited in a way that will be beneficial to the presenter. Some of the things that I think we're trying in the peering track include having the laptops view the presentation at the same time so, when updates are happening, perhaps you could facilitate the discussion using Jabber or those types of technologies. Maybe there's a way that we can exploit the fact that everyone here has brought their laptop computer, we all have wireless access and there are things we can do with that technology to pull things together. That's the side I'm looking at. What can we do besides going off into individual directions until the Q&A time happens. PAUL WILSON: OK. Thanks, Bill. I think we've still got a remote location in New Delhi with some people from the Internet service providers Association of India. I'd like to ask if someone's looking at Jabber if there's any question or contribution coming from there. Have you got anything there, Sall'ee? SALL'EE RYMAN: There was a comment requesting people to use the mic but that was covered. The presenter's option - "It should be the presenter's option to throw the switch on the Internet" PAUL WILSON: On the Internet, yeah. SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Would that kill Jabber? NURANI NIMPUNO: There was also a comment on Jabber to make it 100% online voting. PAUL WILSON: See if they'll put that in writing.