I'm not a newcomer, but I don't go to meetings very often. I joined
the IETF list in 1990 and have participated in some WGs on and off
since then, but in that whole time I think I've attended only 5 IETF
meetings. So, in the stats the secretariat keeps, I don't know if I
show up as a repeat, especially considering that I've only registered
twice under the same employer, thanks to the plethora of mergers in
our industry :)
When I do attend a meeting, I take the opportunity to visit other WG
sessions I'm interested in. Often these are topics that I've
participated in in the past, but have had to drop due to limited time,
so I read drafts occasionally and I visit WG sessions when I'm there,
just to keep up and maybe be able to plug back in more easily at some
point in the future when I have time. I think one of the main
benefits of going to an IETF meeting, as opposed to WG mailing lists
or interim meetings, is exactly that. Being aware of what's going on
around our own narrow WG interests gives it all a useful context. And
more than once I've been able to speak up at a session of a WG I
wasn't participating in, and say "hey, are you aware of similar
project X being done in WG Z that seems to relate to what we're
discussing here?"
Because I attend so infrequently, outside of whatever WG I happen to
be participating in at the time, few people recognize me. So even
though I'm not a newbie, people have no way of knowing that. I've
found that the IETF is one of the easiest organizations for a new and
unconnected person to be accepted in and taken serious. Perhaps *the*
easiest. I often find myself in hallway conversation with chairs and
ADs and protocol authors, who don't seem to think of themselves as any
different from any other IETF attendees, and who will speak with
anyone who has an interesting point to make, whether they know the
person or not.
Sure, there are some barriers, when some people know each other and
other's don't. But in the IETF, the barriers are at their weakest.
As with all such situations, a lot of the perceived barrier is likely
in the perceiver's head, and in this case, I think that's more true
than in most. If you *think* there's an old-boy network, and treat
people accordingly, and hesitate to talk, that can be self-fulfilling.
It's easy to percieve a clique where there isn't one, if you're
expecting a clique.
-- Cos (Ofer Inbar) -- cos(_at_)aaaaa(_dot_)org
cos(_at_)exodus(_dot_)net
-- Exodus Professional Services -- http://www.exodus.net/
"We all misuse the net for personal gain, one way or another."
-- Larry Wall <lwall(_at_)netlabs(_dot_)com>