Re: Varying meeting venue -- why?

[Dave CROCKER <[e-mail]>]

Disclaimer:

      I'm generally in favor of the Day Pass model, and I happen to think that 
attendance by tourists is fine.  I think we must not make strategic decisions 
that affect our primary work, in order to accommodate tourists, but I think it 
well and good to make ourselves open to them.  I can even argue that there is 
strategic benefit in being open to them. In any event, I have not anything that 
argues that the Day Pass has a problematic effect.

      My analytic effort is to try to understand how the Day Pass makes economic 
and logistics might make sense and how it might not.  This is a pretty classic 
market analysis exercise.



On 8/16/2010 11:05 AM, Ole Jacobsen wrote:
> The target market was well specified in Hiroshima: Expose a new
> community to our work.

As a secondary goal for the IETF, this has to be a good thing.  And I don't see 
the Day Pass, per se, affecting the primary goal(s) of the IETF.  I had thought 
the goal was to facilitate narrow(eg, single-working group participation), 
rather than public education, but it's fine that 'participation' wasn't the 
primary purpose of the Pass.

I'll even argue that such brief exposures probably provides some longer-term 
benefit, by giving potential attendees a taste for our community.  That will 
make us more (or perhaps less) accessible to their later efforts.


>    And I don't see how this is a
> "private model".

Sorry.  I've missed where I used the term private in the question of Day Passes, 
so I don't understand your reference.


> The rest of your message tries to define day-pass participation
> in terms of geography and I think that misses the point. I don't
> believe that getting from "home" to X and back home in one day
> is necessarily the goal, but I can easily see someone flying to
> Europe for example, attending the IETF for one day, then doing
> other business in X or somewhere near X, or maybe even not that
> near X (requiring more travel).

Then I didn't make my point clearly enough.  I am suggesting a model of 
incremental cost, in terms of time and money.  The person traveling a long 
distance and having the IETF as merely one of a number of activities is going to 
go to the IETF if the incremental cost is reasonable; they will not go if it 
isn't.  I understand the purpose of the Day Pass one of bringing one part of the 
cost down to a 'reasonable' level, for these folk.  That evaluation holds true 
for anyone else who does not already have a strategic commitment to IETF attendance.

My model, then, assumes that a Day Pass makes sense for two kinds of people: 
Those who won't have to spend the night at the IETF venue and possibly those who 
can spend at most one night.  One can debate these two criteria, but I think 
they provide a reasonable starting point. More nights means more expense.  At 
some point, the surrounding costs make the savings of a Day Pass irrelevant.

Someone traveling a long distance and going only to the IETF is not going to 
view the cost difference between a Day Pass and a regular registration as 
significant.  As soon as the IETF is merely one of a set of activities, I'll 
claim that the incremental cost and time become relevant to these folk, the same 
as more local residents.


> If you prefer the term "regional" to "local", then fine, but again
> I don't think this should be a significant factor in deciding if
> we continue the experiment or not.

The reason that sort of modeling is important is that it defines potential 
attendees.  If there is no definition of potential attendees and no agreement 
that that definition makes sense, then there is no logic underlying the extra 
effort to have Day Passes.

However there are interaction effects to consider in this sort of analysis.

The more remote the venue, the smaller that set of candidates for a Day Pass.

The more expensive the venue, the smaller the set of candidates for a Day Pass.


d/
-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net