Folks, On 8/3/2012 3:38 PM, James Polk wrote:
Having missed only 2 meetings in 13 years, I can say that no venue was perfect, but some were very good. It becomes a case of which venues have the fewest "bad" things.
...
The crowded hallway we can't change. We can change where the snacks are served, and I have read that will happen for our next meeting in Vancouver here in 15 months.
Long before I started serving on the IAOC (last year) it was clear to me that the Secretariat & related staff knew/knows how to do their job, both in terms of planning and in terms of fixing problems. My opinion hasn't changed in the last year. Well actually that's not quite true. They seem to be a bit better than I thought...
It's not that a occasional suggestions are sure to be entirely unnecessary, it's that most of them are... (So, was it wrong that I felt a tiny glow of satisfaction at seeing a sign appear about a half-hour after suggesting it to them, at the beginning of the week?)
On the other hand, there's a macro-management point that /does/ need to fall within the community purview:
Should we constantly seek new venues or should we prefer returning to a small set of them?
The tendency for the last 20 years has been to seek new venues quite often. Our rate of returning has been relatively low. That means that most meeting venues are unfamiliar and run the risk of some serious, unforseen problem. And my own observation was that we have tended to suffer roughly one major venue problem a year.
Visiting familiar places means that a) we know the tradeoffs at a place, and b) we can tune our use of it. Visiting new places means we can find /better/ places to return to, albeit while also finding worse. Locking down on on a fixed set of venues means we miss these improvements. (It's also been noted that returning regularly often tends to get degraded performance over time.)
However the tendency of the community has been to express preference for the tourism of going to new places.
If we really want venues to function towards some ideal, we need the benefit of a multi-visit learning curve.
And it means we stop being tourists. d/ -- Dave Crocker Brandenburg InternetWorking bbiw.net