Out of the way

I have been in a meeting for three days, to try and develop an open, free specification for the Web. The particular meeting was the W3C Compound Document Format Working Group - trying to ensure that when documents are mixed together browsers do the same thing, so that authors can rely on something.

In a quiet moment I did a quick back-of-the-napkin calculation of what this meeting cost. It's a fairly typical meeting for the W3C - about 20 people from 4 continents working about 9 hours a day (officially - a fair bit more work gets done in the evening thrashing out complex issues over a quiet beer or orange juice, according to preference) for three days. Not surprisingly in this male-dominated industry the people are mostly male (and in this particular case everyone was), and each one of them is looking over a laptop screen and talking over a constant hum of fingers tapping keyboards.

This is actually important. People have work to do, and in quiet moments most people can follow a bit of the rest of their work, which they have been away from for the best part of a week. There are also a few tools that are used to manage the process of having a meeting - tracking the agenda, following up on "action items", maintaining a list of issues and decisions, keeping a queue, taking minutes in real time that people can look at and respond to if they are not able to be physically here.

This exercise in mental gymnastics and saving the Web doesn't come cheap. A very rough calculation suggested that overall spending on this meeting itself is 3000 euros / hour, or so (taking into account travel costs, paying people for a day's work each day, but not the follow-up that is done). That means that a quick joke and laugh can easily cost the same as a round of drinks. A misunderstanding over the topic, that has to be explained, can cost the same as a new bicycle. A heated shouting match, a couple of insults, an effort made to bring people back to behaving a bit calmer, and we could all have gone out for a fancy dinner on the money spent.

Thousands of these meetings take place around the world, on thousands of topics. Billions of dollars are being spent on treating questions from how to create sewerage treatment infrastructure to ways of convincing more people to buy toilet paper, and everything in between. I spend a lot of time being one of the handful of people in a room working on the thing I am working on that day (and usually for some time every week, week in, week out). Some very clever people are trying to solve a whole set of complex problems. And someone is running this meeting - chairing, deciding when we take a decision, keeping the group to the agenda, stopping people from talking on and on about nothing but letting them explain something that is hard to understand.

So the chair has a €50/minute hose, that they use to control a group of 20 cats, in an attempt to come up with a specification that people can use to make the web work better. And these cats are nice guys, working for companies or for themselves, trying to make things better. As they understand "better". So are the chairs, doing a pretty tough job. It's surprising how well many of the people I have worked with actually do this. It's surprising when they are not valued for or measured against the hundreds of thousands of dollars they are directing well or ineffectively.

So thank you to everyone who has ever decided not to repeat what the last person said in a meeting, or has chaired effectively, or taken minutes, or thought about how to explain their point a little faster and more clearly...