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

[Dave Crocker <[e-mail]>]

On 8/4/2012 4:24 PM, Livingood, Jason wrote:
> On 8/4/12 1:31 PM, "Dave Crocker" <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> If we really want venues to function towards some ideal, we need the
>> benefit of a multi-visit learning curve.
...
> Of course holding meetings in a range of locations, some new, also
> provides the opportunity to attract new meeting hosts rather than relying
> on a small pool of regular hosts. Ultimately, there are pros and cons to
> either model and the current model does not seem especially bad (quite the
> contrary I think).

My note highlighted some tradeoffs, and your note adds to that.  The 
main point is that choices among tradeoffs have very different effects, 
both desirable an not.

If the community wants venues to be reliably excellent, it's not enough 
merely to have excellent staff.  We need to go back to the better places 
and benefit from the learning curve.  This doesn't mean "no new venues" 
but it means fewer.

The influence of choosing sites based on hosts has, in my view, tended 
to work against these functional benefits.[1]  The counter, of course, 
is the benefit having a host can bring, most notably funds.


> Perhaps when we the Internet is less dynamic (I hope it is never so) we
> could meet in just one city all the time, as I understand some other
> standards development group does. ;-)

It's been amusing (not) to hear claims that the IETF needs to wander 
around the world for its meetings, for what is really a marketing 
campaign, to counter some of those other groups... who do indeed sit in 
one city for all of their formal meetings.

Moving around in order to spread the pain of travel among folks who 
actually do the work is one thing.  Moving around to improve public 
relations is quite another.



On 8/4/2012 8:55 PM, John Levine wrote:>> And it means we stop being 
tourists.
 >
 > Depends where.  I would be happy to be a tourist in Vancouver, Quebec,
 > Paris (assuming we can sort out the Hotel Klepto issue), and/or Berlin
 > every year.

Given the context and content of my note, I suspect that I was not 
referring to attendees' taking advantage of a venue's sightseeing 
opportunities, but rather to a possibly strategic orientation to choose 
different venues in order to /create/ tourism opportunities.  I might 
even have thought that I made the latter focus clear enough, but alas 
didn't word things to bullet-proof against creative misinterpretation.

Sorry.

d/


[1] Shortly before I joined the IAOC, an important paradigm change was 
instituted.  In the past, venues were primarily chosen /after/ getting a 
host, so the host could largely decide where to have the meeting. With 
some regularity, this produced extremely limited choices in sites. More 
recently, the model is to choose the venue and then seek a host.  This 
permits us to get a venue much sooner than we used to, which greatly 
improves our choice of meeting site.  While sometimes creating a greater 
challenge for finding a host, I think the newer paradigm is a vast 
improvement.

-- 
  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net