Subject: Re: qb - a new floor ctrl tool fro asking questions

From: [email-masked] (Tim Dorcey)
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 1997 14:30:32 -0800

At 10:18 AM 4/23/97, Ben Anderson wrote:
>I disagree, virtually all of our real-world group interactions rely on
>people behaving nicely backed up by social, cultural and (if necessary)
>legal re-inforcement. Turn-taking in meetings depends on context and social
>mores NOT physically imposed gagging (usually ;-)...
>
>IMO one of the great things about the MBONE tools as currently used is that
>we have been able to use them to support a range of group communication
>contexts without the need for any technically imposed 'turn-taking'. I take
>this as a demonstration that social regulation (ie assuming that people
>will behave nicely) can work across a range of environments.

I agree.  From my experience, you want a system which can insure that a
conference will work well only when participants are cooperative, but which
can prevent catastrophe when they are not.  Systems which try to enforce
reasonable behavior through technical controls are likely to be too
cumbersome.  On the other hand, you do need a way to censor the occassional
bad apple, though the mechanism needn't be especially convenient.

In that regard, what are existing mechanisms to prevent unwanted
contributions to multicast distributions?  When will source-specific
pruning be routinely available?

Tim