NZNOG People, OK, I asked for further feedback and now I've got some. Quite a lot actually. With a certain amount of interpretation on my part (e.g. all cases of "I'll bring along some other people" interpreted as "I'll bring along one other person"), I believe that we have something like this: Potential attendees volunteering: 21 Potential attendees volunteered by others: 7 Offers to provide or be speaker(s): 7 Offer to help organise speakers: 1 Offers to help organise: 5 Offers of venue: 4 Offer of sponsorship (i.e. money): 1 Offer of exhibition network equipment: 1 There have been relatively few statements of preference as to location: Auckland: 3 Wellington: 3 With UniForum NZ: 2 Hawke's Bay: 1 Outside Auckland and Wellington: 1 Interpreting the comments of two University of Waikato staff as votes for Hamilton would not clarify that picture any. I'm impressed. All of that in three days. We do appear to have enough interest to justify proceeding to planning a specific event. In doing that we face a number of inter-related decisions. 1/ Do we wish to restrict this to one day, or are we looking for a residential conference? I think this is the most important of the decisions. It has implications for cost, obviously, but also for where we do this and what sort of organisational structure is needed. A residential conference should probably be outside (though within reach of) Auckland or Wellington to keep costs down and to reduce the temptation to go back to work. Conversely, that can be expected to make it harder for some people to attend. I'm assuming that we do want a national event rather than local meetings over drinks, but if that's not the case, now's the time to say so. I'm also assuming that multicasting is an add-on to a physical event, not a substitute for one. 2/ Are we happy to have a vendor provide a venue? There has been at least one quite feasible, as well as generous, offer from a vendor. Whether this is even an issue depends on the answer to the previous question. 3/ How often are we planning to do this? Should we be thinking big on the basis that this is a once-a-year thing, or are we trying to keep the scale down so that it will be repeatable more often? This is closely related to cost, in money and time to organise. See also question 1. 4/ How much emphasis do we want to place on construction of a laboratory/exhibition network as opposed to paper sessions? More hands-on fiddling means the option of having attendees have stuff explained to them as they do it, but requires a longer event. My Opinion: "The opinions expressed in this programme are bloody good ones." - F. Dagg I wish us to be very conservative in what we expect from the team of people we put together to organise this. I believe that if we choose a residential event we should piggyback it into UniForum NZ's event and seek to have them do a fair amount of the work for us. Conversely, if we choose a one-day event we should seek to cooperate with a host organisation - whether an education institution or a company - while ensuring that a NZNOG committee (yes, sorry, it has come to that) retains control over the programme. In either case a certain amount of exposure for vendors is to be expected. As to frequency, I'm inclined to go for as large an event as we think we can manage, and worry about the next one after we've learned about running one. Others may think differently. I believe that the composition of the committee/team/chain gang will vary depending on exactly what we're trying to achieve. So I'd like to see some discussion of these questions, and others that seem relevant _to potential attendees_ before we try to work out who's going to be asked to take the next steps. I'd hope for some clearer idea of where we're going within the next few days. - Donald Neal ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "This communication, including any attachments, is confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, you should not read it - please contact me immediately, destroy it, and do not copy or use any part of this communication or disclose anything about it. Thank you." ============================================================================== - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog