Re: laptops on stage in plenary (fwd)

[Rob Austein <sra@hactrn.net>]

Excerpted from what I said about this on the IAB discussion thread:

Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 13:26:10 -0500
From: Rob Austein <sra@hactrn.net>

It does make us look distracted.  I failed to understand one question
at this most recent IAB plenary when I received an interrupt via
laptop while the questioner was still circumnavigating whatever his
point eventually turned out to be -- I'll never know whether I would
have understood the question if I had been paying full attention, but
I'm sure that the distraction didn't help.

On the other hand, there's been at least one recent case where most of
the IAB folks on the stage lacked the context necessary to understand
the unspoken parts of the question.

Mixed bag.