I think we should not let the perfect become the enemy of the good with regard to measuring impact. If we see a large cohort of first-time Buenos Aires attendees show up at later meetings (Berlin being the first chance for them to show), we have a strong signal that they thought it was worth it, and likely that having the meeting in BA helped the community by helping recruit them. Case closed (apart from some corner case possibilities I'm sure we, being engineers, can all imagine). If we don't see such a cohort, we need to dig deeper. Let's do the obvious measurements. They're not useless just because they don't show everything. On 04/19/2016 08:56 PM, Vinayak Hegde wrote: > On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 11:25 PM, Ted Lemon <mellon@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> It should be pretty easy for the IAD to measure this by comparing the list >> of newcomers in Argentina to the list of participants in Berlin, for >> example. I am fairly sure that they already do this, and possibly may even >> have made presentations about it from time to time at the plenary... :) > Hi Ted, > > I am not picking on you but this idea is flawed at many levels. > Fundamentally we need to answer > 1. What does a (meaningful ?) contribution mean ? > 2. How does that relate to active participation ? Are there thresholds > or is it a continuum ? Does I mean writing a draft or is reviewing > drafts, taking minutes and hacking on code to check real world > implementation good enough. > > The answers are more nuanced and varied than one might guess at first > glance. At IETF 95 in BA several long-time contributors participated > remotely. I am sure that they would take offense to this idea if they > have contributed remotely and on the mailing lists. > > Just to emphasize, several WG chairs also do not attend every meeting. > Are they active ? I think there needs to be less emphasis on physical > meetings overall (FWIW I think we are already moving in that direction > quite rapidly. But at the same time F2F interaction cannot be done > away with completely IMHO and is also not going away.) > > -- Vinayak >