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Re: IETF Attendance by continent

2010-08-06 19:37:51
Dave,

These numbers probably need to be correlated with the venue of each meeting. 
One would expect higher Asian attendance at an Asian venue, and so forth. 
Controlling for venue could produce a very different interpretation of the 
numbers.

I think that shows up clearly in the numbers.


More substantively I heard someone ask a particularly useful question that 
is, unfortunately, challenging to answer:  Namely, what is the distribution 
among the folks who are doing primary work.  That is, what is the 
distribution among IETF management, working group chairs and authors?  (There 
are serious workers who are not among this set and should also be counted, 
but I've no idea how to label and include them in this subset analysis.)

Meetings are subject to a substantial spike in local attendance.  These folk
are, of course, quite welcome, but they typically do not contribute much to 
the
actual work of the IETF.

Because the primary goal of an IETF meeting is to get work done, knowing the
distribution of workers might inform efforts to choose venues.

A question for you.  Should we select meeting venues to minimize the 
cost/time/etc. of all attendees or just, for example, w.g. chairs?  Many people 
have suggested that the IAOC should be looking at overall attendee costs, but 
there might be a difference in what group we try to optimize.  

Personally, I lean toward more openness and would prefer to do optimize for all 
attendees.  


To my knowledge, nothing is recorded that makes this analysis straightforward.

My impression is that perhaps 1/4-1/3 of the attendees are long-term IETF 
workers who will go anywhere, with perhaps 1/3-1/2 being much more recent 
repeat attendees.  Attending multiple meetings is a good indicator of some 
involvement -- since that's the criterion for Nomcom participation -- but 
it's probably only a moderate predictor

As an experiment, I just did some averaging of the data to try to remove the 
local effect.  I removed the attendance number for local attendees.  That is, 
if the meeting was in Europe, I removed the Europe attendance number.  Then I 
averaged over the past three meetings and for the whole series.  My thinking 
was that the non-local attendees are probably the core IETF attendees.  It 
should remove the local effect.

For the past three meetings it was:

Africa          1%
Asia            30%
Europe          26%
North America   41%
Australia       2%
South America   1%

For all of the meetings it was a little different (higher % in NA, less in 
Asia, about the same in Europe).  I not sure it is as valid since there was 
only one meeting in Asia and many in North America.

PDF below with the numbers.  

Bob

Attachment: AttendanceByContinent.xlsb.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document



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