In all fairness, Barry Tunick originally asked to participate in a standard forum discussion. It was Scott and Ken who suggested the pre-selected questions format because they realized having Tunick participate in an open forum for a short period of time was unworkable.
Well, to be fair about being fair....it was a number of OTHER YORF contributors who stressed how impractical it was going to be to use the original format. We did not think Barry realized how likely it was to become a train wreck, not by "bad" questions, but that when he asked for "next question", there would likely have been a dozen or more people posting their "one question" in the same minute. And of course everyone would have had to be refreshing their browsers at least once a minute to see if Barry had posted a reply and asked for the "next question" yet.
And to be fair to Scott and Ken, they did know this and tried to convey at least some of it to Barry, but he did not want it that way, so then the rest of the YORF members were told that's how Barry wants it. But some of the other YORF members were skeptical that Barry REALLY knew all of the problems that were caused by that format. And that "hoping it would go smoothly" was not exactly a great "plan". Let me glue just one fin on my Alpha and hope it will go smoothly when I fly it...
Fortunately, over last weekend, the significance of those issues was realized strongly enough, and conveyed to Barry Tunick sufficiently for a change to have been made. I am glad they did.
If TRF had tried to do the same thing as in the original plan, 100% open live via the forums like this one, and not a "Live Chat", and without a "Queue line", then many of the same issues would have occurred.
It seems the main thing Barry Tunick wanted was for a lot of people to have been "free" to ask questions without any one person selecting wha they thought were the "best" questions, and that was his motive for originally wanting it to be totally "live". The change that was made, to ask in advance, but to post all of the questions publicly on YORF first, served much of the original idea, and proof to Barry (and anyone else) that the questions did come from lots of people and were NOT mostly written in secret by one or a few people.
Now there were logical limits put on the questions such as one per person, with a second question if less than 50 original questions were asked by the first 50 people to post questions. And no personal questions (which at least one person broke) or proprietary questions (sort of gray-ish there since in a way any questions about Estes' plans could be proprietary). First 50 people to ask on-topic questions within the guidelines, those were the 50 questions submitted to Barry.... whether good insightful questions or total waste of opportunity questions.
So, the final format chosen, 50 questions in advance, posted publicly by those who wrote them, with adequate time for Barry to answer them, is FAR superior to the original 2-hour "live" train wreck that was set up to occur.
- George Gassaway