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Re: IETF Attendance by continent

2010-08-07 08:05:34
Dear Noel;

On Aug 6, 2010, at 9:26 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote:

From: Bob Hinden <bob(_dot_)hinden(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com>

I do note that it seems clear that registration is related to where
we meet. That show up pretty clearly the current data. So judging
where to have future meetings based on past participation will tend
to keep us where we used to meet.
...
I think an important part of the meeting rotation is to equalize the
travel cost/pain for most attendees. 

The last makes some sense, but I wonder about the 'local attendees'
affect. Clearly you will always get a goodly number of people from the
location where the meeting is, but how far does the 'continental' effect
reach in that breakdown?

We do have some data on this point - the day pass experiment (DPE) has shown 
pretty conclusively IMO that the IETF
does not get a lot of truly local ad-hoc participants. Most day pass attendees 
appear to be regular attendees who could only make it to that particular IETF 
for one day for whatever reason, not local people who just wanted to sample an 
IETF meeting. 

It has long been known that IETF meetings have a local attendance effect. I 
thought, before the DPE, that this indicated a potentially large number of 
observers, presumably interested, but not interested enough to travel long 
distances due to the cost and time required for longer trips. This, to me, 
suggested that day-passes, at a reduced rate, would bring out a lot of new 
people (as the time and financial burden would be even less). This did not 
happen, on any of the 3 continents where the DPE has been run. 

So, I now assume that the "local attendees" are people who are seriously 
interested and involved in the IETF, able to travel in-region or in-country but 
unable to get approval, funds or time for week-long international travel. 

Regards
Marshall


E.g. for a North American meeting on the West Coast, how many North
Americans are coming from the East Coast? For the Far East, how many are
coming from other countries in the Far East?

To put it another way, do we have a substantial pool of people who will
travel a long ways for a meeting in their home continent, but not to other
continents? I think that's the group (and its breakdown by continent) we
really need to look for/at. _If_ that's heavily skewed to one continent,
we might want to bias the meeting schedule in their favour.

(The people who will always come, no matter where it is, aren't as much of
an issue, although all else being equal, as you point out it would be good
to equalize their pain. As for the local-only attendees, well, no matter
where you go, you only get them from close by, and we can't visit all
plausible cities on any sort of schedule, so I'm not sure how much weight
we want to put on letting one-time attendees get a taste of the IETF.)

      Noel
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