Re: IETF Attendance by continent

Just to give a counterpoint, Maastricht was incredibly productive. Perhaps you 
didn't see clusters of people at the conference centre, but there were plenty 
of groups going for walks, going out to dinner, and having interesting 
discussions. 

I don't subscribe to the notion that shutting everyone into a confererence 
centre-cum-campus with all amenities onsite (and a corresponding dearth of 
other options, e.g. Minneapolis or Anaheim) is going to lead to higher 
productivity. 

Cheers,


On 09/08/2010, at 4:14 AM, Michael StJohns wrote:

Hi Bob -

I appreciate and believe that this is your highest priority, but I think we 
may differ on how to best accomplish a successful meeting.  Maastricht for me 
was an example of the low end of sort of successful sites and that's 
primarily because of the conference center with hotels model rather than the 
opposite model of a hotel with a conference center.   

In Maastricht, there wasn't a central hotel bar, no place to happen upon 3 or 
4 disjoint conversations on wide topics, no 11pm discourse on how to fix the 
problem that came up in the session earlier that day. No place to buttonhole 
Russ or Olaf over a beer after dinner, etc (although they may appreciate 
that).

A great portion of the IETFs success is due to cross fertilization and 
serendipity and that has been fed in the past by having a comfortable place 
with drinks and food that you pretty much have to go by to get to your hotel 
room. Typically, these have been the most successful (in terms of new ideas 
and energy) meetings.

In Maastricht you had that big central room with uncomfortable chairs and 
pretty much no reason to be there if you weren't using the internet or 
weren't either going to or coming from a WG session.  I saw few random 
gatherings (but I admit, I probably wouldn't have been able to tell them from 
the non-random ones).  Compare and contrast this with Anaheim for example.  
So, Maastricht was probably fine if you were narrowly focused on your WG(s), 
but not so great if you were interested in how the various problems might 
interact or were interested in learning about the IETF itself.

It's also possible that I'm waxing philosophical for a portion of IETF 
culture than is no longer important to the current crop of participants - but 
that's life I guess.

Mike



At 11:16 PM 8/7/2010, Bob Hinden wrote:

Mike,

Just to be clear, the highest priority in venue selection is to find a venue 
where we can have a successful meeting.  We won't go anywhere were we don't 
think we can get the work done.  This discussion is where to have a meeting, 
but not at the expense of the work itself.

Bob

On Aug 7, 2010, at 4:15 PM, Michael StJohns wrote:

Fred said this much more eloquently than I could.

On the IETF78 attendees list there's been a lot of discussion about where 
to meet - with the primary consideration seeming to be "pretty and small".  
  I may be in the minority, but I'd really rather the IETF go places where 
the ability to  "get work done" is the primary consideration.  

So going forward, I hope the considerations for location will give higher 
weight to meeting the needs of the folks doing the work (my second list of 
folk) and the folks who keep coming back (the first list) than to the 
single meeting snap shots.  Its possible the demographics for my two lists 
are similar to the raw demographics so my point may be moot - but why guess 
when we have the data? 

Mike



At 12:34 AM 8/7/2010, Fred Baker wrote:

On Aug 7, 2010, at 12:37 AM, Bob Hinden wrote:

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. Nomcom is, as you point out, 3 of 5 meetings.  WG 
chair and authors might have a longer history.


I agree with the "openness" principle, but I disagree with this analysis. 

"3..5" is another way of saying "people that attend multiple times". As 
noted by others, first-time attendees (who by definition haven't attended 
anywhere else and therefore give us no guidance) and local-only attendees 
(which is unknowable but demonstrably a component) aren't very 
interesting. What is interesting is trying to serve people that 
participate. We went to Adelaide on the observation that we had IETF 
participation from there and a proposed host (which was also why Adelaide 
was chosen over, say, Sydney) at a time that we had never been to 
Australia. We went to Amsterdam, Stockholm, and so on on the observation 
that we had significant European participation and proposed hosts. We went 
to Japan when Japanese participation became important, and we're going to 
China in November largely in response to the fact of credible levels of 
Chinese participation. So observing participation doesn't limit us to 
where we have been, it extends us in the direction of those who p

rtic

ipate.

Looking at people who have attended multiple meetings, and using the 
nomcom rubric, make sense to me more than worrying about first-time and 
local-only attendees. I would take it on faith that we will have the 
latter wherever  we go, and build on those that return.
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