There's obviously a subset of the "newcomers" who only attend because a
meeting is local or otherwise convenient to attend, or come with narrowly
focused interests, and never planned to become a regular.
Since attendance is largely flat over last few years, obviously newcomers
that become regulars are offset by existing participants that drop out or
cannot make a particular meeting. Drop outs have to be expected for any
number of reasons, such as change in job function, change in (or loss of)
employer, end of a work item of interest, and so on.
I, for one, think we're actually not in a bad place right now, and would
not welcome a return of the 2600-attendee meetings, where meeting rooms and
hallways were filled to overflowing, with no real commensurate increase in
the set of participants doing the work.
Cheers,
Andy
On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 9:53 AM, Adrian Farrel
<adrian(_at_)olddog(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk> wrote:
Trimming SM's email...
There is a direct contribution of US $2.2 million by the Internet
Society next year. Is the plan to rely on Internet Society subsidies
or to fix the deficit? One argument made was that the fees have not
been increased over the last years. I'll point out that there hasn't
been significant increase in paid attendance over the years. Either
the IETF is only relevant to the usual folks or else the meetings are
not made relevant enough for (new) people to attend.
I am repeatedly struck by how many new people *do* attend.
According to Russ's slides [1] 195/1098 are newcomers. And just to labour
the
point, a newcomer is not a returnee after 10 years, but someone who has
never
attended before.
This number (around 10%) seems consistent over all meetings. So naively, we
should be growing our attendance by around 300 per year.
That we are not reflects our inability to retain, not our inability to
attract
(assuming that we are not completely refreshing the IETF attendance every
three
or four years). Should not be rocket science to follow up with some
newcomers to
find out why they only attend once and never come back.
All other points made by SM may be valid.
Adrian
[1] http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/85/slides/slides-85-iesg-opsandtech-13