So, I suspect that at least part of this is caused by there being a number
of different incentives at work / people optimizing for a number of
different things[0].
1: Some people attend IETF purely for getting work done - this means that
they are perfectly happy to go back to the same N hotels, over and over.
They don't *really* care what the destination is like, they don't need
pretty beaches and holiday amenities. During they day they spend most of
their time in sessions, and in the evening they spend much of their time
hanging out with other IETFers. They will probably attend all / most
meetings, regardless of where they are. Minneapolis is fine with them.
2: Some people like to combine their IETF work with a vacation / only show
up for a session or two, and spend a significant amount of their time
sightseeing / wandering around, etc.
These folk do not like going back to the same destinations, they like
locations (like Hawaii, Paris, Prague, etc) where they can go do other
stuff. They are much less likely to attend a meeting in a location that
they don't like (e.g they may skip Minneapolis in the winter).
3: Some set of people are responsible for actually, you know, running the
meetings. They have many incentives, at least one of which is actually
having enough money to be able to run the meetings, and have people happy
with the meeting. Economies of scale makes it better to have lots of
people... Seeing as people from set 1 are likely to attend everywhere where
people from set 2 do, but not the opposite, it makes sense to optimize for
set 2.
4: Folk from set 1 seem to be more vocal then people from set 2, but a:
there are lots of people in set 2 / there is a significant overlap -- this
was demonstrated by: A: the amount of discussion about "Whee, let's go to
Minneapolis" versus B: the results of the meeting location survey done a
few meetings back.
5: Some set of folk think that planning a meeting and choosing a location
is easy. If you open a browser and type in "hotel" there are many, many
results. This *surely* means that we can easily find one that will take out
money. After all, we are a "prestigious" organization, no hotel is going to
give up a thousand or so guaranteed guests, and, well, the $confernce met
there a few years ago. Unfortunately $confernce is not the same as the
IETF. There are many many constraints and tradeoffs that the IETF meeting
planners have to take into account. I'm part of the NOC team and regularly
chat with someone who is involved in some of the site selection. One of my
favorite games is "Why don't we go to XXX?" - fairly much anywhere I
suggest has already been considered, and there are good reasons (often
surprising) that it has been disqualified.
Believe it or not, the meeting selection committee / IOAC is not sitting
around scratching their armpits and / or optimizing for ways to make people
sad...
W
On Fri, Dec 18, 2015 at 11:45 AM Tim Chown
<tjc(_at_)ecs(_dot_)soton(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk> wrote:
On 18 Dec 2015, at 08:36, Eggert, Lars <lars(_at_)netapp(_dot_)com> wrote:
On 2015-12-17, at 19:10, Warren Kumari <warren(_at_)kumari(_dot_)net> wrote:
Perhaps if IETF attendees didn't demand everything that we do (lots of
breakout rooms, walking distance to bars and restaurants, no trains, the
ability to install and run our own network, not being in Minneapolis, large
cookies, specific price points, a willingness to keep going back to the
same N locations) we wouldn't have so much kvetching.
+1
Indeed, Minneapolis is great!
Tim