Re: Varying meeting venue -- why?

[Mary Barnes <mary.ietf.barnes@xxxxxxxxx>]

I don't at all disagree with your assessment  - having had a colleague that "negated" my vote only because he thought Quebec City was a nicer place to be than Vancouver (despite the fact that he lives on the West Coast), certainly highlights that the tourism aspect seems to be important to alot of folks.  But, IMHO that's a poor criteria for organizing and finding a location for a business meeting.  I can somewhat understand the sponsorship issue but when I organized meetings in the past, I was able to get sponsors to consider a locale that wasn't in the same city as their headquarters, but was at least a convenient distance from such that also made travel to the meeting a whole lot easier for many of the participants.  Obviously, I'm not fully aware of all the negotiation it takes to find a sponsor, but my understanding was that there was some flexibility in the choice of city for the meeting in the Netherlands, so it seems that a more convenient location could have been selected. It seemed to me that the idea of a new location in a nice city for tourism was of fairly high priority, whereas my personal opinion is that those things are "would be nice" but shouldn't be key criteria in selecting a venue.

All the issues I personally encountered with the meeting in Maastricht would have been entirely avoided if the basic criteria of having the venue close to the majority of the hotels, restaurants sufficient for the volume of participants nearby for lunch and dinner, as well as access to markets for folks that have dietary restrictions had been satisfied.  Typically, all these criteria can be met in any major city with direct flights for the majority of participants and availability of reasonably priced transport from the airport to the venue 24 hours a day to accomodate folks that might encounter flight delays. 

It seems that both Maastricht, Dublin and Vienna didn't meet that criteria.  Although, I did certainly enjoy the tourism opportunities at those venues, the effectiveness of the meeting was reduced IMHO.  

Regards,

Mary. 

On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 2:29 PM, Dave CROCKER <dhc@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 8/12/2010 11:47 AM, Mary Barnes wrote:

 However, based on the poll, it seemed that folks preferred Quebec City, which
suggests that the majority of folks don't favor the idea of returning to the
same city.

The danger, here, is a classic form of statistical sampling error. Was the question asked of the right population of possible attendees?

Many IETF participants are well-funded, stay for the whole week and like being tourists.

Tourism is fun, but the danger is in tending to force a very narrow 'socio-economic status' demographic for IETF participation.

An example of the problem with the day pass experiment is our tendency to be at venues that discourage one-day attendance.

d/
--

 Dave Crocker
 Brandenburg InternetWorking
 bbiw.net
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf@xxxxxxxx
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf@xxxxxxxx
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf