On Fri, 11 Jan 2002, Donald Neal wrote:
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?
Residential but no more than two days. Venue needs to be somewhere with a reasonable airport closeby preferably with cheap airfares.
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.
I'm content with that as long as it doesn't become something like the "Microsoft Weenies", "Cisco Kids" or "Juniper Berries" NZ Network Meeting. It's important that the meeting is vendor/provider neutral so that criticism of or complements to particular vendors/providers can be voiced. It would be really good if sponsorship came from multiple sources.
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.
Once a year but keep the scale down as well.
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.
Choose a venue that has a network we can use. Otherwise you have people having to arrive in advance to set up the network and stay behind afterwards to take it down. I'd have thought that this group was sufficiently au fait with setting up networks that this was a bit of a busman's holiday. This advice has been independantly valued at 7c. - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog