Re: reception not useful for WG chairs

[Michael Richardson <[e-mail]>]

Wes Hardaker <[e-mail]> wrote:
    > Here's a turn around question for the crowd: what would it take to make
    > the general reception a viable spot to meet and serve the purpose of a
    > pre-meeting meet-and-greet with people you need to talk with?  What
    > could be done other than "throw out everyone I don't need to talk to",
    > which I don't think is a viable solution.  If it's too loud, what could
    > we do?  If it's too popular, what if we removed food/drink for the first
    > hour (so only the dedicated showed up)?  What if we held it in a bigger
    > room?  What if we had per-topic/area group-tables?  What *would* work?

This is why I changed the subject :-)

1) I think that removing food/drink is not the right direction.
   Spreading it out so that it's not all gone during the first hour would
   help me better.  There are usually lines.  I don't like standing in lines
   when I could be talking/drinking.
   Given that we have lines, let's harness them rather than banish them.

   Have the line go through some standing tables the way that good stores
   make use of banking lines to sell you chips and USB charge cables you
   didn't know you needed.
   Put ADs at those tables.  Supply ADs with food via waiter.

2) I objected to HotRFC overlapping the second hour of the reception.
   Others objected to my objection, maybe because for them, the reception was
   already useless, and they saw no point in dragging out the pain.
   But, I think that also goes in the wrong direction, and that removes many
   people that you'd like to talk to from the reception.

3) Don't close the room at 7pm.  That usually doesn't happen, we don't get
   kicked out,  but the bar usually does pack up.

4) Consider if we should start slightly later than 5pm...

5) noise.  can we do this in a few, connected smaller rooms rather than one
   huge room?  Can we hang carpets?  That's what they did for noise (and
   heat) in medival castles..
   So it's very much hotel/conference facility dependant,alas.
   (this is why it is nice to keep going back to the same hotels...)
   I was just thinking about London Metropole... spread the reception out all
   over the place... but no, that's *too* much decentralization.
   But a nice thing when we where there, was the newcomers' space basically
   opened upon into the bigger reception room.
   The alcoves in Seoul were very nice for conversation, but we didn't really
   harness that for the reception.

   If we did do this in a multitude of smaller rooms, then we could close up
   some rooms, but not all rooms.


Back to (2), if HotRFC needs to be on Sunday, let's make it 4pm to 6pm, have
it near the reception, which starts at 6pm.  Maybe we want to project it from
a smaller room into a bigger reception room.  That should be easy given
meetecho.

Poster sessions: an alternative (for some people) to HotRFC may be to have a
small poster session with an idea.   Maybe that's too formal. I'm not sure.

--
Michael Richardson <[e-mail]>, Sandelman Software Works
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