Subject: RE: Meeting room size estimation

From: Bernie Volz <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1998 13:30:51 -0400

How about asking some additional questions on the registration form?

If the form asked which working groups or BOF sessions are you likely to
attend, that would give the folks scheduling sessions an idea as to the
likely attendance. Of course, past history can also be used as it might
be more accurate for sessions that have been running for several IETF
meetings.

The web form would just allow follow to check the sessions they are
likely to attend (just the WG or BOF session name, not the time/date
as those might not be known).

- Bernie Volz
  Process Software

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1998 08:44:11 -0800
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked], [email-masked]
Subject: Meeting room size estimation
CC: [email-masked]

Fred,

As the co-chair of an IETF working group, I must confess to some
puzzlement about estimating meeting room size.  How can I do this?
I really have little idea how many people showed up in my working group
at, say, the last four IETF meetings.  It is always a g**awful big
room full of faces and a long list of names on the blue sheets,
but I don't keep any record of how many.  Perhaps keeping such
statistics is a chair's responsibility, but I was not aware of this.
Even if I did know, how would I extrapolate to the NEXT meeting,
taking into account things like the overall registration?

On the other hand, CNRI *does* have the data necessary to make an
informed guess.  I know they are terribly busy, but maybe there could
be some two-way flow of information between secretariat and WG chairs,
to home in on a realistic estimate?

It also seems that this estimate must have large error bars, so the
actual meeting room should be 30% larger than the
one-standard-deviation upper bound.  A .67 occupancy works better than
a 1.3 occupancy, I believe.  At least, it is more comfortable.
Maybe with central record keeping we could even learn to do it better.

Bob Braden

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From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1998 19:32:29 -0500

>How about asking some additional questions on the registration form?

It occurs to me that this task would be perfect for a web form, although
the up-front effort to design the mechanism wouldn't be trivial.

the registration form would require lots of hand processing, and that is a
large continuing expense.  We should find a way to automate it.

d/

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From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1998 19:32:29 -0500

d/

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From: "David W. Morris" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1998 09:53:04 -0800 (PST)

> large continuing expense.  We should find a way to automate it.

For those of us whose IETF activity is supported by web application
development, this is a pretty small application, even when fleshed out
as my previous mail suggested. Unfortunately, a big enough effort I
can't donate my time and have any left to read drafts, etc.

Dave Morris

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From: "David W. Morris" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1998 09:53:04 -0800 (PST)

Dave Morris