On Nov 9, 2012, at 9:31 AM, Abdussalam Baryun wrote:
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 newcomer and not able to attend because most of meeting in
America instead of Europe.
Adding US and Canada attendees (I counted last week, might have changed
slightly) you get to about 51% of the attendees.
When meetings are held in other parts of the world (like Taipei, Paris or
Prague) Americans still make up over 40% of the attendees.
Much as I prefer 4-hour flights to 12-hour flights, it minimizes the general
pain to hold meetings in America.
There's also the issue that finding good venues is considerably easier in
America than in either Europe or Asia
I am repeatedly struck by how many new people *do* attend.
I don't know how long do they remain, for me I am feeling disapointed.
Some come back, and some don't. Could you expand on what you're disappointed
about?
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.
hope treated equal with all participants,
The new attendee, same as the old attendee gets to have everyone shut up when
they go to the mike. If you have a draft and a relevant presentation, you can
usually get time at a WG meeting regardless of how many meetings you've
attended. Knowing that you should do these things is the learning curve that
every one of us must go through.
This number (around 10%) seems consistent over all meetings. So naively, we
should be growing our attendance by around 300 per year.
agree
But as both you and Adrian Farrel said, a lot of these don't come back. Maybe a
more relevant statistic for the churn would be to count the third-time
attendees.
Millions of people go sailing for the first time each year. A huge proportion
of those get sea sick or bored, and never do it again. That's not a useful
metric to assess the size of the sailing community.
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.
For me I still did n't attend but understand that many old
participants are biased and there seems no equal opportunity, people
don't always follow the IETF mission and procedure, they just follow
their ways as long there was no complain.
I call all newcomers to open a new WG and start complaining because we
have to discuss why we were disapointed of the IETF and IESG, and even
the Internet Society.
Please note that I will focus my volunteering work in complaining and
fixing the discourage I found so far.
OK, but if something or someone discouraged you, speak up. Existing members
can't help you if you don't tell us what's wrong.
Yoav