Disclaimer:
I'm generally in favor of the Day Pass model, and I happen to think that
attendance by tourists is fine. I think we must not make strategic decisions
that affect our primary work, in order to accommodate tourists, but I think it
well and good to make ourselves open to them. I can even argue that there is
strategic benefit in being open to them. In any event, I have not anything that
argues that the Day Pass has a problematic effect.
My analytic effort is to try to understand how the Day Pass makes economic
and logistics might make sense and how it might not. This is a pretty classic
market analysis exercise.
On 8/16/2010 11:05 AM, Ole Jacobsen wrote:
The target market was well specified in Hiroshima: Expose a new
community to our work.
As a secondary goal for the IETF, this has to be a good thing. And I don't see
the Day Pass, per se, affecting the primary goal(s) of the IETF. I had thought
the goal was to facilitate narrow(eg, single-working group participation),
rather than public education, but it's fine that 'participation' wasn't the
primary purpose of the Pass.
I'll even argue that such brief exposures probably provides some longer-term
benefit, by giving potential attendees a taste for our community. That will
make us more (or perhaps less) accessible to their later efforts.
And I don't see how this is a
"private model".
Sorry. I've missed where I used the term private in the question of Day Passes,
so I don't understand your reference.
The rest of your message tries to define day-pass participation
in terms of geography and I think that misses the point. I don't
believe that getting from "home" to X and back home in one day
is necessarily the goal, but I can easily see someone flying to
Europe for example, attending the IETF for one day, then doing
other business in X or somewhere near X, or maybe even not that
near X (requiring more travel).
Then I didn't make my point clearly enough. I am suggesting a model of
incremental cost, in terms of time and money. The person traveling a long
distance and having the IETF as merely one of a number of activities is going to
go to the IETF if the incremental cost is reasonable; they will not go if it
isn't. I understand the purpose of the Day Pass one of bringing one part of the
cost down to a 'reasonable' level, for these folk. That evaluation holds true
for anyone else who does not already have a strategic commitment to IETF attendance.
My model, then, assumes that a Day Pass makes sense for two kinds of people:
Those who won't have to spend the night at the IETF venue and possibly those who
can spend at most one night. One can debate these two criteria, but I think
they provide a reasonable starting point. More nights means more expense. At
some point, the surrounding costs make the savings of a Day Pass irrelevant.
Someone traveling a long distance and going only to the IETF is not going to
view the cost difference between a Day Pass and a regular registration as
significant. As soon as the IETF is merely one of a set of activities, I'll
claim that the incremental cost and time become relevant to these folk, the same
as more local residents.
If you prefer the term "regional" to "local", then fine, but again
I don't think this should be a significant factor in deciding if
we continue the experiment or not.
The reason that sort of modeling is important is that it defines potential
attendees. If there is no definition of potential attendees and no agreement
that that definition makes sense, then there is no logic underlying the extra
effort to have Day Passes.
However there are interaction effects to consider in this sort of analysis.
The more remote the venue, the smaller that set of candidates for a Day Pass.
The more expensive the venue, the smaller the set of candidates for a Day Pass.
d/
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
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