Koch, Christian wrote: > 43 was my first nanog - needless to say, majority of the people > attending were on laptops not paying attention to the presenter.
Some people can multi task. They use their computers to get a better view of the presentations, look up relevant material, and be better able to ask intelligent questions. Obviously not all people are completely interested in all the presentations, but if you require that they either pay 100% attention or leave, I think you'll find that participation will actually go down. > We all have jobs, but if you can't leave your job for a few days w/o > needing to be in front of your computer doing _something_ , send someone > else to the conference who will benefit from the material being discussed... Surely you understand that the presentations at NANOG are only part of the draw of NANOG. Many of the presentations are recycled topics from other conferences and even earlier NANOG conferences, so many attendees have already seen the material, although there may be some new points, so while 100% attention is not required, it is still a good idea to keep an ear on the presentation. And there are a good number of people that attend NANOG and only go to one or two presentations, or only the BOFs, or only the social events. Those are all valid reasons for attendance for some people. > Surely I understand situations arise where you have to fire up your vpn > and do something, and that's foreseeable, but if you're going to just go > to the con to be on your laptop all day, what is the point? I don't think you understand why all the people are at NANOG. When I manage to go, I notice that the only attendees that pay 100% attention are usually the people from abroad. -Sean _______________________________________________ Nanog-futures mailing list Nanog-futures@nanog.org http://mailman.nanog.org/mailman/listinfo/nanog-futures
