John, > > Fine plan if we can put a stop to having breakfast and lunch be > the prime target for assorted management and coordination > meetings. Yes. > I would, however, favor conducting a lottery among, say, > first-year attendees (but not first time unless they qualified > by useful mailing list participation -- see my earlier comment > and Spencer's response)-- and inviting the winners to sit in on > IESG or IAB breakfast meeting, Not sure if that should be the winners or losers :-) Seriously though, I am roughly in the same camp as Seiichi. The real introduction of someone into the IETF is mostly about finding discussion partners around the reason why the person came to the IETF to begin with. Most of the time these would be peers within a working group. Like-minded vendors, customers or researchers. Not everyone who comes to the IETF for the first time is a beginner, they may for instance be established engineers on their fields, and just coming to the IETF to accomplish a goal. We discuss very interesting topics at the IESG and IAB, but I think the more direct way to introduce someone to the IETF "network" is to connect the person with others who work in the same topic. And maybe create some real co-operation between those people, building additional reasons for the person to continue to join our meetings. Anyway, this is a great thread. Plenty of ideas to consider. Sometime-later-than-Sunday sounds an interesting proposal, so do the WG breakfasts. In any case, scheduling is typically difficult with any approach we take. I also liked the beer motivator idea :-) and ideas about better ways to reach the newcomers. As an aside, from personal experience, small, targeted meetings with newcomers have tended to work better for me than otherwise. Jari