NANOG 90 Attendance?

Sun Feb 11 19:50:17 UTC 2024

On Sun, Feb 11, 2024 at 8:31 AM, Mike Hammett <nanog at 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."

W

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
>
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