RE: Meeting room size estimation

[Bernie Volz <volz at process.com>]

How about asking some additional questions on the registration form?

If the form asked which working groups or BOF sessions are you likely to
attend, that would give the folks scheduling sessions an idea as to the
likely attendance. Of course, past history can also be used as it might
be more accurate for sessions that have been running for several IETF
meetings.

The web form would just allow follow to check the sessions they are
likely to attend (just the WG or BOF session name, not the time/date
as those might not be known).

- Bernie Volz
  Process Software

From: braden at ISI.EDU
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1998 08:44:11 -0800
Message-ID: <199812141644.AA07059 at gra.isi.edu>
To: IETF at ietf.org, fred at cisco.com
Subject: Meeting room size estimation
CC: 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