Here is feedback from the 2005 conference. In many of the catagories most people wrote "good" or "excellent" . I've kept most of the comments to give people an idea of the feedback except for some duplications. Once again some people dislike bits that others really enjoyed. -- Simon J. Lyall | Very Busy | Web: http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/ "To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | eMT. Attendance ---------- Did you attend NZNOG 05 ? : Yes: 25 No: 11 Did you attend NZNOG 04 ? : Yes: 17 No: 20 Did you attend earlier NZNOGs? : Yes: 15 No: 21 If you didn't attended NZNOG 05:
a. what reasons didn't your attend?
* Small geek team, it was my turn to miss out. * There was a conflicting conference in Rotorua (Moodle Moot) * Family / personal / On Leave * Late work commitiments * Work wouldn't pay and didn't want to use up holidays. * Bad timing (its the start of the school year) plus location. * Tried to but spent a day and a half at Wgtn airport in fog :-( * Cost/Location
b. What would have made you more likely to attend?
* Timing * If it had been held in Auckland, and I'd been able to use company time to attend. * Different location (wlg would be ideal) and maybe a little later in the year. Also, need information on location and costs about August/September for budgetting purposes. * Being held in Wellington * 3 * Location NZNOG 05 --------
1. Did your employer pay for all or part of the costs? Did they give you time to attend or did you have to take holidays?
2. Please comment on the following, how you feel about them and how important
Employer paid all costs and paid for the time to attend: 17 Self employed: 4 Employer paid most costs and paid for the time to attend: 2 Pay for own costs, Employer paid for time at conference: 2 Paid own way, took holidays off: 1 these are to you.
General organization:
In general, good. Although the schedule can be a bit hectic. Sometimes when you have a longer presentation which has good input from people in the audience I would like to see it allowed to "run long", but understandably that pushes everything back. No huge complaints, seemed to go off without any significant hitches. Need to remember to put Taxi numbers on the info sheets next year. Was good, if a little on the expensive side considering - what a Waikato student pays for 7 nights including 3 meals a day is probably only a little more than what i payed for 2 nights with breakfast, and i was in the "off-season". Appeared to be well organised and executed. I never noticed any flustered people or catastrophes. Pretty good. I would have liked the programme to be out much earlier.
Accommodation:
Far too hot. Air conditioning or fans needs to be provided. Next time I'm probably going to ask for a hotel. Not bad. Fairly basic, but really its just a bed and a shower in the morning... Got what I paid for I guess (on campus shoe box). Handy, and the refore I was happy enough. Relatively important to have something nearby and cheapish. Reasonably priced accommodation is a big benefit and having this accommodation "on site" is desirable as well.
Wednesday night dinner (curry):
Excellent, as per usual. Compliments to Lin. Good, but clearly unable to handle our numbers. A little disappointed by this, but I don't imagine this was all the organisers fault. Mmm, curry good. Enjoyed the curry, was good talking to people too. Actually, the curry was good for talking to people you don't normally get to talk to. Awesome social and networking opportunity, not necessarily crucial to the success of the conference however. I'm sure it would happen even if it wasn't officially organised. Very good, not so important. I have reservations though about non-drinkers subsidising vast quantities of alcohol. Perhaps the tab could have been split?
Thursday Dinner (Official dinner):
Good, although the bar tab needs to be bigger. Outdoors was a bit odd. Not bad though. Good, Free beer would have been nice? :) Again, a good evening and excellent social opportunity. Excellent. Food was good enough, bar tab sufficient, and company great. The highlight of the conf. Useful, possibly more important than the Wednesday night dinner in that you can be fairly certain most people will turn up. But not vital. A "Thursday Night Curry" style unofficial dinner would be an okay substitute.
Internet Access:
More ethernet would be nice, old laptops dont have wireless Great. Easily accessible from pretty much everywhere. Couldn't live without irc in nznog, also enables emergency support from off-site The Internet access was great, allowed me to get quite a bit of work done, however it was not well published what the ssid etc was. Would be good to see those details on information sheets. Vital. Ideally both at the conference venue and the accomodation. I probably couldn't be away for 2-3 days without some form of Internet access (and GPRS probably wouldn't cut it). I suspect that's true for most others. It doesn't have to be amazingly fast but it does have to be possible to log in to things and fix them when they break. Good in lecture theatre, needs to be more widely available in accomodation block
Other:
I think it should be in Tahiti or similar next time. Well scheduled events, felt a little rushed for some talks though. A broad range of topics and international speakers is important too. Particularly in order to convince management that their is value in attending the conference (ie. you're getting something that you couldn't get in NZ any other time of the year). Would have liked an extra socialising event. Maybe even an extra official dinner (slightly less grand), as a ploy to get more socialising happening. The morning and afternoon snacks were great. Morning/Afternoon teas are useful for ensuring people stay around and chat to each other, but I suspect everyone would cope without if it was a deal breaker. Very male dominated... Being female there werent too many other females to socialise with. Scheduled bus from Airport to accommodation should be provided Shirt was poor quality, but that's a minor thing. Cold drinks on hand were great.
3. The main presentations. a. Can you list things in the programme or the conference that your especially liked.
5 * Joe's peering talk, 4 * The peering game 4 * The Pacific.Net on Wireless projects and the real world issues 2 * Bill Woodcocks tail Spam workshop. BGP the movie was fascinating. 2 * Peering Panel 3 * Philip Hazel on Exim Peering Tutorial wise it would be Exim. The Asia Pacific Peering Ecosystem 4 Short History of Peering in New Zealand 5 * Lightning Talks The Bills. 5 * Bill Norton - APAC Peering Ecosystem BGP The Movie AMPNZ APNIC Talks focussing on global internet trends The exim tutorial but i missed it due to fog! The peering talks were very informative, the wand BSOD software. Lightning talks were good, and would be happy to see them take a whole morning with a tiny bit longer for each person. Deans work on "internet background radiation" was interesting and I'm keen to hear a followup talk on how he's going with that. New technology and demonstration.. Random scribbles on the board from presenters was always a big plus. Joe's item on peering in NZ. Turned into a great discussion on the whole history of the 'net in NZ, which should be written down somewhere more useful before we all lose our minds. 10GB bankbone monitoring, that was just plain cool. :) Really good speakers. Local content. Reasonably relaxed. I found the peering presentations (jabley, woody, bill N) extremely good. Also of good amusement was BGP: The Movie, while providing some good insight into resource consumption. The balance of practical talks, history, research and policy worked reasonably well at NZNOG 2005. I'd like to see that sort of mix preserved. I can't really identify any one part that was "best" out of that -- any one of those to excess would be boring. The lightening talks are a good idea, and should be done again.
b. Can you list things in the programme or the conference that your especially disliked.
- Juniper/BGP session - initially advertised as BGP using Junipers, turned into JunOS using (occasional) bgp examples. Not particularly useful to me after all. - Internet Safety Group talk is policy not technical - please avoid scope creep. - Netsafe - The Cybersafety thing - The ultrawideband wasnt that exciting - UWB presentation was lacking. - Ultrawideband developments - Ultra Wide Band Development - The ultrawide band talk of 2005, while probably fairly relevant to many attendees in terms of what is coming, etc, seemed not to manage to hit the right tone to engage people. I think it's vital to drag people, kicking and screaming if necessary, into some interest in policy (APNIC, NZ, etc), but perhaps there's a way to do it that keeps people interested in the topic. (eg, combined with a technical "why I should care" talk.) - Ultra wide band development. - I found the Exim presentation, well, boring. It wasn't applicable to me (I don't work in mail systems any longer; and I don't use Exim anyway) so that is partially why. - Philip Hazel's Exim stuff could be have been really interesting, and in the end it was kinda average. It wasn't bad, just somewhat limited. I know there was a tutorial on the thing as well. - Might be nice to have more discussion/workshop time. - The fact that so much of this was 'internet' as opposed to 'network'. More generic networking topics would be nice... - Not really, nice diverse range of topics, something for everyone - The WAND updates/quick talks were too rushed. Some great material that deserved a little more 'air time'. Perhaps even just 10 minutes each. - Boring presenters - Routing Protocols for multi-hop wireless - Parallel talks (fortunately only one this conference) are a real pain, as i dont want to miss anything. Please dont have any. - Some talks could have been compressed into tighter blocks. - The boring ipv6 diagnostic stuff. - Rude/annoying comments to the speakers from the audience members - I find network measurement boring.
c. Do you have any other comments about the programme or running of the conference.
- Don't change too much - it works well! - Tea break food was sub-par - Snacks between talks wern't all that healthy. - More beer, more curry. - Might be worthwhile taking registrations of interest for situations where two talks are running simultaneously. I gather only a half dozen people went to Liz Butterfields presentation at NZNOG05... - The official programme was released far too late. I had to take a gamble that the programme would still be good because at the time i payed my money it was still subject to change. - Would have been happy for the conference to have had an extra day or half-day in length. - Perhaps a slightly later start would be nice for each day. I'd prefer to start and finish slightly later myself. - Would be nice if the conference could end more in the early afternoon than the evening so people have more time to drive home in daylight. (this might only be nessessary at a location like hamiltion where quite a few people were driving home to auckland). - How hot it was. - PGP keysignings are useful. But possibly best combined with a short "why I should care" talk (or lightening talk). They really need a bit more organisation in advance than was the case - Contents is good, although I feel there's some split between the kinda systems vs network people, but I expect to do more networky/net facing stuff, than pure systems.