John,
Fine plan if we can put a stop to having breakfast and lunch be
the prime target for assorted management and coordination
meetings.
Yes.
I would, however, favor conducting a lottery among, say,
first-year attendees (but not first time unless they qualified
by useful mailing list participation -- see my earlier comment
and Spencer's response)-- and inviting the winners to sit in on
IESG or IAB breakfast meeting,
Not sure if that should be the winners or losers :-)
Seriously though, I am roughly in the same camp as Seiichi. The real
introduction of someone into the IETF is mostly about finding discussion
partners around the reason why the person came to the IETF to begin with. Most
of the time these would be peers within a working group. Like-minded vendors,
customers or researchers. Not everyone who comes to the IETF for the first time
is a beginner, they may for instance be established engineers on their fields,
and just coming to the IETF to accomplish a goal. We discuss very interesting
topics at the IESG and IAB, but I think the more direct way to introduce
someone to the IETF "network" is to connect the person with others who work in
the same topic. And maybe create some real co-operation between those people,
building additional reasons for the person to continue to join our meetings.
Anyway, this is a great thread. Plenty of ideas to consider.
Sometime-later-than-Sunday sounds an interesting proposal, so do the WG
breakfasts. In any case, scheduling is typically difficult with any approach we
take. I also liked the beer motivator idea :-) and ideas about better ways to
reach the newcomers.
As an aside, from personal experience, small, targeted meetings with newcomers
have tended to work better for me than otherwise.
Jari