Re: New-comers

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

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?
...
> 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