The Mandelbear's Musings

I was reading an interesting blog post a few days ago with the catchy title "How do we make remote meetings not suck?" by Chelsea Troy. The main point was that meetings need some form of moderation, otherwise people tend to talk over one another. This is especially bad in remote meetings because a lot of the visual cues are missing (even with video), and also because network delays make pauses in the conversation hard to distinguish from a series of dropped packets.

Naturally, because I'm a filker, I immediately thought of the many ways our musical community has for organizing song circles. For those who haven't taken part in such a thing, a song circle is a group of people sitting around in a rough circle to sing. Song circles present many of the same problems as meetings, and in the sixty-odd years that people have been singing at conventions they've come up with some interesting solutions. (I might add that similar solutions can be found in operating system schedulers and computer networks; I'll leave most of the details as an exercise for the reader.)

The simplest method is the Bardic Circle, which is more familiar in the OS literature as round-robin scheduling -- the turn simply gets passed around the circle, e.g. to the right (or left) of the person singing. (Without loss of generality I'll say "person singing" for the person whose turn it is at the moment, but they have other options, e.g. picking someone else to perform, asking the group for a song on a given topic, or simply passing. This is generally expressed with the phrase "pick, pass, or play".)

The more people you have in the circle, the longer it takes for somebody to get a second turn. In a large group it can take an hour or two, but it's probably the most effective way of managing such a large group. There's a kind of computer network, now largely obsolete, called "Token Ring" that works pretty much the same way.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is the Chaos Circle, which is pretty much what it sounds like. This works best when there are comparatively few people who want to perform, and when they're all from roughly the same (geographic) area. Different regions have different expectations about what constitutes a pause -- we ran into this recently in a conversation that included several people from New York and others from the West Coast. Ethernet, back when every computer was connected to the same piece of coax, was chaos with the convention of exponential backoff to resolve collisions.

Moderated Chaos usually works well in slightly larger groups -- a moderator can resolve collisions by saying "okay, you get the next turn" A good moderator will also keep track of who hasn't had a turn recently, and encourage them to sing. My guess is that this is probably closest to what a moderated meeting is like. The moderator can either be assigned ahead of time by the event organizers, or may simply volunteer if things are getting too chaotic.

In between, we have Token-Passing Chaos, and Poker Chip Bardic. In a token-passing circle each performer gets to pick the next by passing them the token. The token is often an inflatable beach ball -- this has the advantage of requiring the performer to pass it along before they take their turn, to get the thing out of the way. Another good token is a ball of yarn. The resulting web makes it easy to spot people who haven't had a turn yet; if everyone gets a turn it's topologically equivalent to a Bardic Circle, but more flexible and fun.

The Poker Chip Bardic is probably the most interesting, and I think it has some potential for meetings as well. In this format, everyone gets three poker chips when they enter the room, in three different colors, and there are three corresponding rounds, one for each color. It's almost exactly the inverse of a Token-Passing circle -- people toss in their poker chip when they want a turn. Requiring each round to be completed before the next one is, again, topologically equivalent to a simple Bardic.

It gets a little more interesting -- and fun -- when you end a round when no-one wants to throw in the next chip. That gives people who pass in the first round a higher priority in the next. Reasons for doing this vary, of course. It's very effective for changing the subject or bringing in a new song at exactly the right moment.

I don't think this counts as a curmudgeon post, even with the slight technical content. But it's a post.