NANOG-futures

[Michael.Dillon]

> Who's going to check badges? 
Merit staff in the main meeting rooms.
Hotel staff in events that are catered
such as refreshments in the hallways or
Beer'n'Gear.

>What boundary do you enforce?

The doorways in the case of a room. The velvet
rope barriers in the case of a hallway.

>  How do you 
> staff the checkpoints sufficiently to handle the typical flashcrowds? 

In the United Kingdom, there is no passport
control for British subjects. This means that
we have the right to enter or leave the country
at will. Until recently, one could pass through 
a fast-lane at a brisk pace by merely holding up
the passport so that the photo was clearly visible
and looking the passport officer in the eye as
you passed. Worked great for flash crowds. Of 
course some Al Qaeda forgers started to sell
excellent forgeries of British passports and
a couple of years ago, we had to hand them over
so that passport officers can handle them and shine
lights on them.

The point is that as long as people wear the badge
VISIBLY, there is no flash crowd problem.

> And who's going to pay for the staff to do this?

Merit already has some staff who hang around at
the back of the room. We could even, *gasp* ask
for volunteers. Do you think that any NANOGers
care enough about this issue to volunteer a bit 
of time?

> How will Merit put 
> enough staff at the table to process a bunch of single-session walk-ins 
> in a timely manner?

Timely? If you want timely, then pay for the
whole conference. Or arrive early. Or decide
that single sessions are too hard and only
do full days or half days.

> Your suggestion doesn't scale.  Sorry.

I think you have never been involved behind
the scenes in organizing a conference. This can and
does scale as far as is needed. Of course, if
everybody attending decided to buy 3 single session
tickets instead of paying for the whole conference,
there would be an issue. But in the real world it
doesn't work out that way. It's more of a Zipf
distribution with the vast majority paying for
the whole conference.

--Michael Dillon