Scott W Brim wrote:
>
> On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 06:58:32AM +0200, Pekka Savola allegedly wrote:
> > On Thu, 20 Mar 2003, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> > > [...] However, I think doing some ISOC/IETF joint
> > > tutorials just before an IETF is definitely worth a try.
...
> Right. I suggest we try some contiguous tutorials to start with, and if
> they are *too* successful we can either add some discontiguous ones or
> move the ones we have.
>
> I don't know what attendance was like at the later INET tutorials.
> Perhaps we could just take over the whole format?
Folks, am I the only one who thinks this is a bad idea?
What's being discussed here is starting a new consulting company,
specializing in IETF technologies and delivering its services through
tutorials. This is hard work, and there is already significant
competition in the area. More importantly, the effort required to get to
the volumes needed is immense.
To pull this off and make a profit, you will need to change from a
volunteer mentality to a professionally run, fee-for-service mentality,
with attention paid to advertising (or you wont get the needed volume of
traffic), printing services (people will need classroom and take-home
material), folks will need to track bookings, arrange the needed rooms,
there will be *additional* cneed for cookies and coffee, etc. I ran my
own company for quite a few years doing exactly this sort of work and
although you can make a reasonably good living at it the delta between
"the technology" and "the rest of the work needed" is far larger that
technical folks usually seem to grok at first reading.
Ask yourself this - if ISOC didn't make enough to justify a meeting this
year, why would the IETF think they could generate enough traffic to do
it during the current tech depression?
Nobody responded to my earlier post, but my suggestion is still to push
for an "IETF TLD". Once it's in the root, it's basically zero impact on
others, no need to negotiate revenue sharing, no need to lay out cash in
advertising courses, booking rooms, printing materials, finding
instructors, arranging cookies, following up on bad visa charges and the
host of other things needed to run a tutorial company. Your fixed costs
are well defined and quite amenable to covering with donations and your
profit margins once you past break-even are great. Oh, and it's a great
way for participants to show their direct support for the process by
using their IETF domain for posting to the IETF lists. What's not to
like here?
- peterd
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Peter Deutsch pdeutsch@gydig.com
Gydig Software
"No, Harry - even in the wizarding world,
hearing voices is not a good sign..."
- Hermione Granger
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