management granularity (Re: Meeting "lounges" at IETF meetings)

[Dave Crocker <[e-mail]>]

Folks,


On 8/3/2012 3:38 PM, James Polk wrote:
> Having missed only 2 meetings in 13 years, I can say that no venue was
> perfect, but some were very good. It becomes a case of which venues have
> the fewest "bad" things.
...
> The crowded hallway we can't change.
>
> We can change where the snacks are served, and I have read that will
> happen for our next meeting in Vancouver here in 15 months.


Long before I started serving on the IAOC (last year) it was clear to me 
that the Secretariat & related staff knew/knows how to do their job, 
both in terms of planning and in terms of fixing problems.  My opinion 
hasn't changed in the last year.  Well actually that's not quite true. 
They seem to be a bit better than I thought...

It's not that a occasional suggestions are sure to be entirely 
unnecessary, it's that most of them are... (So, was it wrong that I felt 
a tiny glow of satisfaction at seeing a sign appear about a half-hour 
after suggesting it to them, at the beginning of the week?)


On the other hand, there's a macro-management point that /does/ need to 
fall within the community purview:

      Should we constantly seek new venues or should we prefer returning 
to a small set of them?


The tendency for the last 20 years has been to seek new venues quite 
often.  Our rate of returning has been relatively low.  That means that 
most meeting venues are unfamiliar and run the risk of some serious, 
unforseen problem.  And my own observation was that we have tended to 
suffer roughly one major venue problem a year.

Visiting familiar places means that a) we know the tradeoffs at a place, 
and b) we can tune our use of it.  Visiting new places means we can find 
/better/ places to return to, albeit while also finding worse.  Locking 
down on on a fixed set of venues means we miss these improvements. 
(It's also been noted that returning regularly often tends to get 
degraded performance over time.)

However the tendency of the community has been to express preference for 
the tourism of going to new places.

If we really want venues to function towards some ideal, we need the 
benefit of a multi-visit learning curve.

And it means we stop being tourists.

d/

-- 
  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net