On 8/4/2012 4:24 PM, Livingood, Jason wrote:
On 8/4/12 1:31 PM, "Dave Crocker" <dhc@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If we really want venues to function towards some ideal, we need the
benefit of a multi-visit learning curve.
...
Of course holding meetings in a range of locations, some new, also
provides the opportunity to attract new meeting hosts rather than relying
on a small pool of regular hosts. Ultimately, there are pros and cons to
either model and the current model does not seem especially bad (quite the
contrary I think).
My note highlighted some tradeoffs, and your note adds to that. The
main point is that choices among tradeoffs have very different effects,
both desirable an not.
If the community wants venues to be reliably excellent, it's not enough
merely to have excellent staff. We need to go back to the better places
and benefit from the learning curve. This doesn't mean "no new venues"
but it means fewer.
The influence of choosing sites based on hosts has, in my view, tended
to work against these functional benefits.[1] The counter, of course,
is the benefit having a host can bring, most notably funds.
Perhaps when we the Internet is less dynamic (I hope it is never so) we
could meet in just one city all the time, as I understand some other
standards development group does. ;-)
It's been amusing (not) to hear claims that the IETF needs to wander
around the world for its meetings, for what is really a marketing
campaign, to counter some of those other groups... who do indeed sit in
one city for all of their formal meetings.
Moving around in order to spread the pain of travel among folks who
actually do the work is one thing. Moving around to improve public
relations is quite another.
On 8/4/2012 8:55 PM, John Levine wrote:>> And it means we stop being
tourists.
>
> Depends where. I would be happy to be a tourist in Vancouver, Quebec,
> Paris (assuming we can sort out the Hotel Klepto issue), and/or Berlin
> every year.
Given the context and content of my note, I suspect that I was not
referring to attendees' taking advantage of a venue's sightseeing
opportunities, but rather to a possibly strategic orientation to choose
different venues in order to /create/ tourism opportunities. I might
even have thought that I made the latter focus clear enough, but alas
didn't word things to bullet-proof against creative misinterpretation.
Sorry.
d/
[1] Shortly before I joined the IAOC, an important paradigm change was
instituted. In the past, venues were primarily chosen /after/ getting a
host, so the host could largely decide where to have the meeting. With
some regularity, this produced extremely limited choices in sites. More
recently, the model is to choose the venue and then seek a host. This
permits us to get a venue much sooner than we used to, which greatly
improves our choice of meeting site. While sometimes creating a greater
challenge for finding a host, I think the newer paradigm is a vast
improvement.
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net