Meeting room size estimation

[braden at ISI.EDU]

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