RE: NANOG 90 Attendance?

[Warren Kumari <warren () kumari net>]

On Thu, Feb 15, 2024 at 10:30 AM, Lee Howard <LeeHoward () hilcostreambank com>
wrote:

> I’m jumping on an earlier part of the thread.
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> Based on what I heard at the Members Meeting and several follow up hallway
> conversations, I think:
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>    - NANOG needs a focus group on attendees. A survey won’t do it, we
>    need a deep dive into roles, interests, career level, and why they attend.
>    - Somebody or somebodies should be specifically tasked with following
>    up with every one of the 120 newcomer attendees to ask what it would take
>    to get them to come back. Our conversion rate to repeat attendee is a key
>    performance indicator. There’s a great Newcomer Orientation just before
>    conference opening; let’s have a Newcomer Lessons Learned at the end.
>    - Poll attendees on relative importance of location, registration fee,
>    programming, side meeting space. Iterate based on comments (location =
>    airport? Hotel? Nearby amenities? Proximity to home?)
>    - Survey sponsors. I give feedback to staff and occasional board
>    members, but there’s no clear way to gather information.
>    - These should be sent to the Members in advance of a Members Meeting
>    to discuss. Needs more than 20 minutes of a 45 minute meeting before main
>    programming.
>    - Consider empaneling a Mission Committee to review NANOG’s mission
>    and how to fulfill it.
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> Other thoughts, which I couldn’t submit in a survey or find another way to
> send to the board or staff:
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>    - I suggested in San Diego and now bring to the list: the last item on
>    the agenda should be 15-30 minutes of “What are you taking home from this
>    NANOG?”
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>       - Helps remind people what value they got
>       - Lets us know what people found most valuable (Specific sessions?
>       deals done? Trends in hallway topics?)
>       - Solidifies for people what they can offer their boss as the value
>       of sending them to NANOG
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>    - We should look into cooperating with other network organizations for
>    meetings. WISPAmerica, NRECA, NTCA, Fiber Connect, SCTE, IETF
>    - ARIN has a help desk in the main hall. Allow other sponsors to put
>    up a Help Desk. Put up a sign showing which company will be there for which
>    half-day increment. I think a lot of attendees would find value in the
>    ability to sit down with a senior sales engineer at their favorite router,
>    optical, or intelligence vendor to say, “Here’s my problem,” even if many
>    of those conversations resulted in “Let’s schedule time to discuss in more
>    depth.”
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>       - Price it like BnG—you’re getting ½ day of visibility, less
>       distraction than meal/break sponsors
>       - Require swag to be incidentals like pens and stickers—if you’re
>       getting a mad rush of people, you’re missing the point

We actually had an IETF "Help Desk" at NANOG 63 (San Antonio, 2015) and
NANOG 64 or 65 —
https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2015/01/chris-grundemann-nanog-63-talking-bcop-ietf-and-more/
and
https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2014/11/operators-and-the-ietf-update-from-ietf-91/

We hoped to answer questions such as:
“Why should I participate in the IETF?”
“How do I get involved in the IETF?”
“What is the difference between an Internet-Draft and an RFC?”
“How do I submit an idea to the IETF?”
“What is the IETF working on in <foo> space?”
“How do I comment on an existing IETF document?”
<your question here>


This was (IMO) quite successful, and I personally thought that it benefited
both the IETF and NANOG.
We had hoped to continue this series, but NANOG moved to wanting to charge
the IETF for a sponsor table[0], and, lacking funds, we stopped.

W


> This can’t all be done in time for Kansas City, but maybe some of it can
> be. Given that hotel contracts are negotiated two years in advance, I
> figure we have about two years to get this right before it’s too late to
> steer the ship away from the rocks.
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> Let me close with: I think we have an excellent board, all of whom love
> this community and have spent years thinking about this. The lack of a CEO
> is a problem soon to be resolved, and that will help support the already
> excellent staff. There are themes we’ve been hearing for several meetings
> in a row, and I know the board is giving them a lot of thought, and I’m
> just trying to support those efforts from outside the board.
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> Maybe this should have gone to the members mailing list, but I couldn’t
> find one.
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> Lee
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> *From:* NANOG <nanog-bounces+leehoward=hilcostreambank.com () nanog org> *On
> Behalf Of *Warren Kumari
> *Sent:* Sunday, February 11, 2024 2:50 PM
> *To:* Mike Hammett <nanog () ics-il net>
> *Cc:* nanog <nanog () nanog org>
> *Subject:* Re: NANOG 90 Attendance?
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> On Sun, Feb 11, 2024 at 8:31 AM, Mike Hammett <nanog () ics-il net> wrote:
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> I haven't been to a NANOG meeting in a while. While going through the
> attendee list for NANOG 90 to try to book meetings with people, I noticed a
> lack of (or extremely minimal) attendance by several organizations that
> have traditionally had several employees attend. I've also noticed that
> some organizations I had an interest in were only sending sales people, not
> technical people.
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> There have been a few changes - part of this is driven by post-pandemic
> decreased travel budget in many organizations, part by industry changes and
> consolidation, but also a fair bit seems to be because the tone of NANOG
> has changed and become much more of a polished, sales-y feeling event than
> it used to be….
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> Here is the current NANOG agenda:
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> https://www.nanog.org/events/nanog-90/agenda/
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> Here is the agenda from 20 years ago:
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> https://www.nanog.org/events/nanog-30/nanog-30-agenda-2/
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> This time I've received at least 6 phone calls along this line of "Hi, I'm
> [person] from [company]. We are a NANOG sponsor and we'd like to personally
> invite you to a very special [breakfast/lunch/dinner] with our [CEO/CTO].
> They'd love to explain how we can solve your
> [security/inventory/DDoS/automation/documentation] needs…"
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> There would alway be business stuff done at NANOG, but it used to be more
> along the lines of "Hey, we have too much traffic in [location]. I saw you
> have a cage in [location] too… If I hand you an Ethernet, can we peer
> there? Great…" or "So, I have a Foozle-1205 with the Turbo-forwarding(R)
> option, but when I configure hyperspace-bypass mode, fire comes out…. I
> know you also use Turbo-forwarding(R), but it looks like you still have
> your eyebrows. Any hints? Oh… cool, I didn't know that you could use
> wormholes to avoid the hyperspace issue. Ta."
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> How long has this been a thing?
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> I remember when I attended years ago that there simply wasn't enough time
> to meet with technical people from all of the organizations I wanted to
> meet with. Now the calendar is looking a bit dry.
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> -----
> Mike Hammett
> Intelligent Computing Solutions
> http://www.ics-il.com
>
> Midwest-IX
> http://www.midwest-ix.com