Re: [78attendees] We gotta stop meeting like this (was: We'll meet again...)

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On Aug 12, 2010, at 2:38 PM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> Nothin' doin'.  When I looked out over the faces in the room on
> Wednesday morning, I saw an awful lot of familiar faces.  And at the
> mic, I heard only familiar voices.  Same in the jabber room.  So how
> much "cross-pollination" is there, anyway?

How did you spread the word on this?

For my own part, I did actually go to a number of sessions I hadn't planned on going to--e.g., I hadn't even heard of mif until Hui Deng mentioned it in another context, *at the meeting in Maastricht*.   So I would say that there is a problem with figuring out how to create a low-noise channel for communicating this sort of information.

I think you have to have an evangelist who shows up for sessions where interested parties might be lurking, and gives a very short presentation at each.   If nobody is evangelizing, our noise filters are too well-tuned to allow us to hear announcements like this from working groups at which we are not regulars.

I don't think this is a problem of meetings.   Whether three meetings a year is necessary or not I can't say.   To me, the problem seems to be one of noise overload in general.   I follow the ietf mailing list, but it's so noisy that I necessarily miss drafts going by that I should be looking at.

The only way to deal with this kind of noise problem is to accept that there will be noise rejection, and evangelize selectively to overcome it.   Selective evangelism is (or should be) a relatively low-noise channel, which makes it more likely that someone will hear what you are saying and act on it.