I’m jumping on an earlier part of the thread.

Based on what I heard at the Members Meeting and several follow up hallway conversations, I think:

NANOG needs a focus group on attendees. A survey won’t do it, we need a deep dive into roles, interests, career level, and why they attend.
Somebody or somebodies should be specifically tasked with following up with every one of the 120 newcomer attendees to ask what it would take to get them to come back. Our conversion rate to repeat attendee is a key performance indicator. There’s a great Newcomer Orientation just before conference opening; let’s have a Newcomer Lessons Learned at the end.
Poll attendees on relative importance of location, registration fee, programming, side meeting space. Iterate based on comments (location = airport? Hotel? Nearby amenities? Proximity to home?)
Survey sponsors. I give feedback to staff and occasional board members, but there’s no clear way to gather information.
These should be sent to the Members in advance of a Members Meeting to discuss. Needs more than 20 minutes of a 45 minute meeting before main programming.
Consider empaneling a Mission Committee to review NANOG’s mission and how to fulfill it.

Other thoughts, which I couldn’t submit in a survey or find another way to send to the board or staff:

I suggested in San Diego and now bring to the list: the last item on the agenda should be 15-30 minutes of “What are you taking home from this NANOG?”

Helps remind people what value they got
Lets us know what people found most valuable (Specific sessions? deals done? Trends in hallway topics?)
Solidifies for people what they can offer their boss as the value of sending them to NANOG

We should look into cooperating with other network organizations for meetings. WISPAmerica, NRECA, NTCA, Fiber Connect, SCTE, IETF
ARIN has a help desk in the main hall. Allow other sponsors to put up a Help Desk. Put up a sign showing which company will be there for which half-day increment. I think a lot of attendees would find value in the ability to sit down with a senior sales engineer at their favorite router, optical, or intelligence vendor to say, “Here’s my problem,” even if many of those conversations resulted in “Let’s schedule time to discuss in more depth.”

Price it like BnG—you’re getting ½ day of visibility, less distraction than meal/break sponsors
Require swag to be incidentals like pens and stickers—if you’re getting a mad rush of people, you’re missing the point

This can’t all be done in time for Kansas City, but maybe some of it can be. Given that hotel contracts are negotiated two years in advance, I figure we have about two years to get this right before it’s too late to steer the ship away from the rocks.

Let me close with: I think we have an excellent board, all of whom love this community and have spent years thinking about this. The lack of a CEO is a problem soon to be resolved, and that will help support the already excellent staff. There are themes we’ve been hearing for several meetings in a row, and I know the board is giving them a lot of thought, and I’m just trying to support those efforts from outside the board.

Maybe this should have gone to the members mailing list, but I couldn’t find one.

Lee

From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+leehoward=hilcostreambank.com@nanog.org> On Behalf Of Warren Kumari
Sent: Sunday, February 11, 2024 2:50 PM
To: Mike Hammett <nanog@ics-il.net>
Cc: nanog <nanog@nanog.org>
Subject: Re: NANOG 90 Attendance?

You don't often get email from warren@kumari.net. Learn why this is important

On Sun, Feb 11, 2024 at 8:31 AM, Mike Hammett <nanog@ics-il.net> wrote:

I haven't been to a NANOG meeting in a while. While going through the attendee list for NANOG 90 to try to book meetings with people, I noticed a lack of (or extremely minimal) attendance by several organizations that have traditionally had several employees attend. I've also noticed that some organizations I had an interest in were only sending sales people, not technical people.

There have been a few changes - part of this is driven by post-pandemic decreased travel budget in many organizations, part by industry changes and consolidation, but also a fair bit seems to be because the tone of NANOG has changed and become much more of a polished, sales-y feeling event than it used to be….

Here is the current NANOG agenda:

https://www.nanog.org/events/nanog-90/agenda/

Here is the agenda from 20 years ago:

https://www.nanog.org/events/nanog-30/nanog-30-agenda-2/

This time I've received at least 6 phone calls along this line of "Hi, I'm [person] from [company]. We are a NANOG sponsor and we'd like to personally invite you to a very special [breakfast/lunch/dinner] with our [CEO/CTO]. They'd love to explain how we can solve your [security/inventory/DDoS/automation/documentation] needs…"

There would alway be business stuff done at NANOG, but it used to be more along the lines of "Hey, we have too much traffic in [location]. I saw you have a cage in [location] too… If I hand you an Ethernet, can we peer there? Great…" or "So, I have a Foozle-1205 with the Turbo-forwarding(R) option, but when I configure hyperspace-bypass mode, fire comes out…. I know you also use Turbo-forwarding(R), but it looks like you still have your eyebrows. Any hints? Oh… cool, I didn't know that you could use wormholes to avoid the hyperspace issue. Ta."

How long has this been a thing?

I remember when I attended years ago that there simply wasn't enough time to meet with technical people from all of the organizations I wanted to meet with. Now the calendar is looking a bit dry.

-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.ics-il.com

Midwest-IX
http://www.midwest-ix.com