Re: a simple solution to the room crowding problem...

[Lloyd Wood <L.Wood at surrey.ac.uk>]

On Tue, 15 Dec 1998, David W. Morris wrote:

> On Tue, 15 Dec 1998, Antony Bowesman wrote:
> 
> > Marshall Rose wrote:
> > > 
> > > well, seriously then, all we really need to do is to require that people
> > > wanting to enter the room have a hardcopy on them...
> > > 
> > > this should solve 90% of the problem with little overhead.
> > 
> > Apart from all the trees.
> 
> The point is to have a simple way to demonstrate some degree of
> readiness... 

Oh, just mention a couple of abbreviations used and defined in your
group's drafts, and ask them what they stand for. There's more than
enough specialist abbreviation soup in most working groups to allow a
fairly large number of tests on incomings before you have to repeat a
question.

If they don't know the abbreviations, the room and discussions will be
wasted on them. No explicit pass key stuff needed; you just need a
clued-up volunteer who likes playing bouncer on the door. The problem
is that this is a waste of a clued-up volunteer, people don't like
being bouncers, and it's very anti-'we're paying to be here'. 

Large signs saying 'If you can't identify the following five terms off
the top of your head, you're wasting your time in here' would probably
do just as well. 

L.

'Okay, you've got a laptop. Now, can you tell me what TCP/IP stands for?'

<L.Wood at surrey.ac.uk>PGP<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>