Dean I'd definitely be a starter for one of those tShirts. Could be that classical evolutionary picture from gorilla to Neanderthal to 21 century human! :-) Enough of that! What is the point of us getting together? I'm not knocking it here, but if we can identify our reasons for getting together we should be able to identify which setup would work for us. Is it for networking? For chewing over a specific issue? For hands on workshopping something (perhaps all the Spam killing ideas of late :-)?) For discussing how to encourage, for instance multicast, growth in the NZ market? Have a clear purpose up front would help ensure that we are heading in the right direction and help prevent it degenerating into a talkfest. We sort out why we want this and we may find that a smaller quarterly or biannual gathering is really more appropriate. Won't know until we know why we want do this. What y'all think? Coming from a vendor this has been valued at only 3 cents (plus GST). Regards Kefyn JUDSON Multiservice Network Architect ERICSSON New Zealand * Phone: +64 9 3555 461 * Mobile: +61 21 535 331 * E-mail: kefyn.judson(a)ericsson.co.nz * SMS: kefyn(a)vodafone.net.nz -----Original Message----- From: Dean Pemberton [mailto:dean(a)flatnet.gen.nz] Sent: Friday, 11 January 2002 11:00 AM To: Roger De Salis Cc: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: Re: NZNOG Conference 2002: Feedback So Far On Fri, Jan 11, 2002 at 10:22:20AM +1300, Roger De Salis wrote: > > 1/ Organisation is pretty much a 12 month cycle (not to say > you can't do a smaller one in less time.) > Damn - my attention span has been clocked at under 10.7 seconds. Seriously though. I don't doubt for a minute that this is a long term job, and as such needs the right sort of person to organise it. > 2/ Guest overseas/celebrity speakers (from 1-3) usually > want business-class airfare plus free accomodation. > Greedy bastards. S/t I think this could be relaxed. None of the companies they work for will be flying them business class at the moment so why should we. > 3/ Organisors, who usually work for nothing, like have their > accomodation paid. (But this need not be the case) > One Maui Camper van comming up S/t If you like the idea enough to volenteer to organise it, then you were probably going to come anyway. So then you would have been paying for your accomodation anyway. So no one should mind paying. QED > > I believe most companies would stump up for this. > There are severe limitations in the number of establishments > that can deal with 50-150 people, and they typically want > 12 month notice of bookings. Yep - this I think will be an issue. We might want to look into this as a phase 1. it might effect some of the scaling decisions that Donald is talking about (single vs multiday, independant vs schlepping off uniforum) > > I'm sure Cisco, being the gorilla of the Internet industry > would be keen to participate, by providing an overseas > speaker, and other companies would no doubt contribute in > like fashion. The principle reason for finding a sponsor > is to stump up the hotel deposit. One tShirt with a slow knuckle-dragging, hairy, drooling gorilla named Cisco comming up =) S/t I don't think Speakers will be a huge problem. I think that doing them for cheap, and getting companies to just fork out disposable cash might be a bit harder. But who knows. > > I think the technical conference in NZ is a worthy one, but > I would put more emphasis on getting managers of Telco's > along, simply as it is an opportunity for them to understand > a little more of the technical side, and perhaps it is also > an opportunity for the techo's to understand the management > drivers. > <t-i-c> Telco's are some of the most technical and intelligent people that I know. They have recently been shown to make EXCELLENT networking decisions. I think they would be a great asset to any conference audience. </t-i-c> Having said all this I guess the thing that I'm worried about the most is that we start too big and it tanks. We are then left with the "Nah, we tried that once but it didn't work" All good points man. Esp the ones about how expensive and time consuming the organising is. Dean - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog