On Thu, 17 Dec 2015, Dave Crocker wrote:
Effort to get decision-makers to have better empathy for the
rank-and-file is certainly useful. The challenge is to make the
effort practical and sufficient. By 'sufficient' I mean it has to
cover enough of the core issues in ways that work.
In this case, hotel choice is only part of the equation. Travel
time and travel cost are two other major factors. So are additional
costs, such as food in the main venue. (We had one main venue with
reasonable hotel room rate but US$ 25 hamburgers...)
***OLE: I assuming you are referring to Yokohama, correct me if I am
wrong. If you are: places to eat outside of the main venue were
literally 3 minutes away with a huge array of options and prices. The
same can be said about hotels, maybe by adding another 10 minutes to
the most outlying properties, all well below $100 US per night. This
is exactly the kind of venue that the community has repeatedly
expressed a strong preference for, and while we would have liked the
room blocks (and indeed the HQ hotels themselves) to be bigger, we
heard lots of comments of the form "let's meet here again!"
To get better surveys, they need to be dramatically more carefully,
in terms of question formulation, respondent selection and response
analysis. This is not a new or unmentioned issue within the IAOC
and meeting committee. What we currently do produces results
dominated by well-funded, continuing participants who are highly
experienced travelers; in effect, we get a tourism response from
folk who are already likely to attend.
***OLE: At the end of the day it comes down to selecting a venue which
will accomodate our MEETING requirements, we use A LOT of rooms for
our meetings which makes that particularly challenging. This is
driving us more and more towards convention centers which further
dictates what the HQ hotel(s) are. The choice of city-centers with a
range of neaby facilities, as preferred by our community, does not
always produce the most perfect and most inexpensive outcome, but I
disagree that it (by design) favors only the well-funded. It's
certainly a trade off, and yes, we could do better, but I hope you
realize that this would ultimately lead us to having MANY meetings in
Las Vegas.
Choices like BA or Sydney inconvenience essentially all attendees, in
favor of goals other than getting work done.
***OLE: Just to be clear, the IAOC did not choose Buenos Aires, the
IESG in dialog with the community did.
To date, there has been little interest in making the necessary effort
to focus on requirements for being more inclusive.
***OLE: It's a complicated issue and it's getting more complicated
as attendance grows, the economy expands (prices go up) and so on.
It would certainly be *possible* to go back to meeting at some
University campus...
Ole
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net