Dave,
Unfortunately, the ultimate and practical meaning, of these kinds of
conclusions about venue selection, is that we do not place
productivity as a high priority. We have a collection of other
priorities that take precedence, for a collection of reasons. This
means that the impact of face-to-face meetings, on productivity and
quality, is almost entirely a matter of luck.
I think some of the goals beyond immediate productivity are also
important, such as financing for our activities or boosting future
productivity. Anyway, I agree with you that face-to-face meeting
results are somewhat random in terms of people turning up or
the most needed people being there. We have, however, experimented
with various meeting details (e.g. Paris timings) and adapted
our behaviour based on what we learned. We are tracking what
number of participants we are getting in, and presumably optimizing
a little bit towards larger crowds. We are changing our locations
to distribute access problems and travel costs a bit better.
But you seem to talking as if you knew where the IETF needs to
meet in order to optimize productivity. Please tell us where :-)
Is our key contributor (draft author) distribution the same as the one
in participating in meetings, or different? We are choosing our
meeting sites according to the meeting participant distribution,
I think. What change has there been in the key contributor
participation across meetings in different continents or meetings
in different times of the year? Have we experimented by holding
meetings for a long period of time at the same location and
determined what effect it had on the number of contributors?
--Jari
p.s. I'm working on a little script to extract author information
such as location data from drafts. If I get it accurate enough I can
post some statistics about contributors. Or maybe someone
already has this data.
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