Re: New-comers

[tom petch <[e-mail]>]

On 16/04/2021 22:14, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> On 17-Apr-21 05:43, Ole Jacobsen wrote:
> ...
>> I think this discussion has assumed that all newcomers are
>> necessarily looking to get directly involved with a working group
>> from Day One and therefore need to do a lot of homework and
>> preparation. I know we keep telling the world that the IETF is "not
>> a conference" and that "people come here to work," but I see no harm
>> in simply exploring what the IETF is all about and then perhaps
>> getting involved in a particular effort after some time, after
>> having attended a few meetings, and most of all after having made
>> friends and even discovered who to avoid! :-)
>
> All the same, my experience from both mentoring and newcomers'
> meet-and-greet is that most people first come because of a specific
> topic, which often (but not always) corresponds to a single WG.
> Presumably Jay could update one of his surveys to ask newcomers about
> that.
>
> That matches the known fact that only a small fraction of participants
> are on even the ietf-announce list (and even fewer on this list).
> Somebody could also do a cluster analysis of WG list subscribers -
> with about 120 WGs, how many separate populations do we have?
> ...

yes, please, some data, as opposed to opinons, feelings and such like.

Who can do it?IAD?

Tom Petch

>> If newcomers risk being "snarled at" it is only due to our own
>> culture and abusive behavior and not due to their lack of preparation.
>
> On 17-Apr-21 06:43, Randy Presuhn wrote:
> ...
>> The common post-meeting reaction was "you
>> should have warned me - it was so much more awful than you described."
>>
>> It was only because our business depended on it that I was able to
>> get them to go to any subsequent meetings, but it also led me to
>> conclude that IETF meetings can be painful experiences for anyone
>> with a shred of empathy.
>
> I may have said this before, but when I first attended an IETF meeting
> it didn't surprise me, because I was used to attending meetings of
> physicists. You need to be thick-skinned for that too. Has the IETF got
> more brutal over the years? I don't think so. That doesn't mean it's OK,
> but let's be clear that this is a long-standing problem.
>
> Do people think the snarling is less of an issue in on-line meetings?
>
>      Brian
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