Subject: Re: IETF Attendance by continent

From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Fri, 6 Aug 2010 21:26:25 -0400 (EDT)

> From: Bob Hinden <[email-masked]>

    > I do note that it seems clear that registration is related to where
    > we meet. That show up pretty clearly the current data. So judging
    > where to have future meetings based on past participation will tend
    > to keep us where we used to meet.
    > ...
    > I think an important part of the meeting rotation is to equalize the
    > travel cost/pain for most attendees. 

The last makes some sense, but I wonder about the 'local attendees'
affect. Clearly you will always get a goodly number of people from the
location where the meeting is, but how far does the 'continental' effect
reach in that breakdown?

E.g. for a North American meeting on the West Coast, how many North
Americans are coming from the East Coast? For the Far East, how many are
coming from other countries in the Far East?

To put it another way, do we have a substantial pool of people who will
travel a long ways for a meeting in their home continent, but not to other
continents? I think that's the group (and its breakdown by continent) we
really need to look for/at. _If_ that's heavily skewed to one continent,
we might want to bias the meeting schedule in their favour.

(The people who will always come, no matter where it is, aren't as much of
an issue, although all else being equal, as you point out it would be good
to equalize their pain. As for the local-only attendees, well, no matter
where you go, you only get them from close by, and we can't visit all
plausible cities on any sort of schedule, so I'm not sure how much weight
we want to put on letting one-time attendees get a taste of the IETF.)

	Noel

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From: Marshall Eubanks <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2010 09:05:06 -0400

Dear Noel;

> location where the meeting is, but how far does the 'continental' effect

We do have some data on this point - the day pass experiment (DPE) has shown pretty conclusively IMO that the IETF
does not get a lot of truly local ad-hoc participants. Most day pass attendees appear to be regular attendees who could only make it to that particular IETF for one day for whatever reason, not local people who just wanted to sample an IETF meeting. 

It has long been known that IETF meetings have a local attendance effect. I thought, before the DPE, that this indicated a potentially large number of observers, presumably interested, but not interested enough to travel long distances due to the cost and time required for longer trips. This, to me, suggested that day-passes, at a reduced rate, would bring out a lot of new people (as the time and financial burden would be even less). This did not happen, on any of the 3 continents where the DPE has been run. 

So, I now assume that the "local attendees" are people who are seriously interested and involved in the IETF, able to travel in-region or in-country but unable to get approval, funds or time for week-long international travel. 

Regards
Marshall

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From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2010 09:11:15 -0600

Marshall Eubanks <tme at americafree dot tv> wrote:

> We do have some data on this point - the day pass experiment (DPE) has 
> shown pretty conclusively IMO that the IETF does not get a lot of 
> truly local ad-hoc participants. Most day pass attendees appear to be 
> regular attendees who could only make it to that particular IETF for 
> one day for whatever reason, not local people who just wanted to 
> sample an IETF meeting.
>
> It has long been known that IETF meetings have a local attendance 
> effect. I thought, before the DPE, that this indicated a potentially 
> large number of observers, presumably interested, but not interested 
> enough to travel long distances due to the cost and time required for 
> longer trips. This, to me, suggested that day-passes, at a reduced 
> rate, would bring out a lot of new people (as the time and financial 
> burden would be even less). This did not happen, on any of the 3 
> continents where the DPE has been run.

At least on the surface, this does make it appear that the decision to 
exclude day-pass attendees from NomCom, on the basis that such attendees 
would not have the requisite experience, is driven by financial 
considerations after all.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | http://www.ewellic.org
RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 | ietf-languages @ is dot gd slash 2kf0s

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 08 Aug 2010 09:35:00 +1200

> considerations after all.

Not at all. Firstly, it's only now that there are even marginally enough
data to analyse the impact of day passes - previously, all we had
was guesswork. Secondly, the argument is quite clear - people who
parachute into an IETF week for one day, for whatever reason, cannot
possibly gain the experience of a full week's participation (for
example, witness the breadth and depth of an AD's work, or properly
understand the interaction of WG meetings, BOFs, Bar BOFs and
corridor discussions). That undermines the whole purpose of measuring
meeting attendance as a Nomcom qualification.

   Brian

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From: Marshall Eubanks <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 7 Aug 2010 18:03:19 -0400

> meeting attendance as a Nomcom qualification.

I agree. Note also that the number of day passes per meeting has been  
so small that the financial effect of
the day pass experiment is literally in the noise at present.

Regards
Marshall

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From: Michael StJohns <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 07 Aug 2010 19:44:27 -0400

>So, I now assume that the "local attendees" are people who are seriously interested and involved in the IETF, able to travel in-region or in-country but unable to get approval, funds or time for wee…

I hate to be blunt, but this reasoning appears seriously flawed.  

None of the last 3 sites have been what I would consider "convenient" for drop ins.  Had these been in say San Jose, or DC, or London or Tokyo I might agree, but not for the sites actually chosen.  When you get to a certain distance from your home, a day pass makes no economic nor time commitment sense - better to attend the most of the week (or at least a couple of days), do your working group meetings, attend the plenaries and have dinner with your colleagues (or the folks you just met in the WG meeting) than try and fly in on one day, do a 1-2 hour WG and then decamp.  I've done that - but its not the best use of my time.

I mean really - is Maastricht such a hot bed of Internet design activity that you would expect 20-30 locals to show up?  And being 2 hours from Brussels and 3 from Amsterdam, I wouldn't expect to pick up any day pass folk from there.  I forget what your numbers showed, but weren't most of the day pass folk previous attendees?

I wouldn't generally expect first-timers to use a day pass. Mostly, they don't understand what an IETF meeting is like (and generally don't believe us when we tell them).  Many of the first timers I've met over the years are surprised there aren't more instructional sessions - they're thinking symposium, not working meeting - and they're here for the whole learning experience.  I would expect day passes to be more attractive to a repeat attendee involved in a specific working group who has other time commitments dragging him away from the site (work, family, etc).

Mike