Ask DrPeering
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Ask Dr. Peering
continuing the thread on the “Ideal Peering Forum” experience...
Goals of the Ideal Peering Forum
The primary goal of the ideal peering forum is to facilitate peering. The ideal peering Forum pulls together the “right” people into the room to establish, build, and maintain relationships conducive to increased peering between the attendee organizations.
There are also critical secondary goals. Chief among these goals is to increase the effectiveness of internet operations for this peering community. It is a goal that these issues are raised in this forum, and that we collectively highlight emerging trends and document best practices associated with the peering coordinator role. The forum assembles individuals aligned with these mutual interests and those willing to contribute their insights, and tries to pull them together into a cohesive community.
Another secondary goal is to ensure that the forum meets the needs of the attendees and their organization so they return to attend the next one.
It is for these Peering Forum goals, and from experiences at some of the best conferences all over the world that this paper tries to capture the best practices.
Attendee Walks Into the Ideal Peering Forum
When the attendee walks up to the Peering Forum Registration Desk he/she is greeted by name (a printed color peering yearbook with photo and name are taped to the table to help the registration staff), and are handed
•A very cool laptop computer bag, with logos of the sponsors of the event, with the name, location and dates of the forum stitched prominently on the bag. (Attendees get so many cheap bags that get stacked in a closet or given away, any viral marketing value of those bags is lost. This bag is intended to replace whatever bag they currently use, will become the bag of choice, and will show up at venues all over the world, making friends and family jealous and sure to try and get an invite to the next Peering Forum.) -- this idea based on Josh Snowhorn killer laptop bag given at a peering event
Inside the bag is
•A SIP phone, preconfigured with all attendees SIP phone #s so they can meet each other. This will facilitate the “I need to find Person X from ISP Y, but I have never met her.” Problem. This also is to demonstrate new technology in an open environment, and as a take home phone, can be configured for use at one’s home network. This phone during to forum is configured to allow the attendees to call home for free using the Internet and SIP gateways in each country that an attendee comes from. -- this idea from the APRICOT where Gaurab made a deal with a wifi phone mfg and preconfigured them with the SIP conference gear.
The attendee is welcomed and handed a Nametag with
1.The Name of the Person prominently displayed
2.the company and AS# prominently displayed
3.a clip-on and/or safety pin to hold the nametag to the shirt. The natural tendency is for people to position the nametag high on the chest, conducive to being read without detection by the attendee. (Note: lanyards are NOT handed out here; they hold the badge in a position below the dining table when seated, and force the eyes to look way down during casual meetings, leading the person to realize that you don’t remember their name.)
4.All nametag info is printed on both sides since lanyards (if an attendee insists on wearing them) often flip around leaving people to walk around with blank nametags around their necks! If no lanyards are used, the ideal forum can use the nametag holder to stow an agenda, meal tickets, etc.
More Giveaways
The laptop bag described earlier is packed with goodies including a logo’d largest possible memory USB sticks/drives. The USB memory stick contains, to the degree possible, the draft slides, associated white papers, the agenda and attendee lists in the form of a yearbook with photos, a couple of books on tape and eBooks for the flight home, etc. all in electronic form. In the evening social and the next morning, attendees can swap their USB pen for a new one that has all the material the original had but upgraded with an MP3/MP4 of the previous days presentations. That way, if there was buzz about a particular talk that was missed because discussions pulled an attendee out of the room, they can listen to the talk and review the slides on the plane ride home. When technology improves, the USB drives will have the previous days videos along with photos/video of the social events for perusal on the flight home, or for highlighting to the folks who approve the travel the value of the event. Since many people need to assemble a trip report, and/or presentation sharing the experience with the teams at home, having the materials handy helps them drag and drop the relevant materials onto an internal server or into a document with links to the sources on the server. The USB pen data will be erased eventually, but the logo on the USB drive will stay, providing the viral marketing benefit of the sponsor.
•Business Card carrying case preloaded with the business cards of the people organizing the event, perhaps with a personalized note to the speakers thanking them for agreeing to speak.
•Location Appropriate Goodies. For example, the NOTA 2005 forum handed out an additional beach bag with a large NOTA beach towel and hat. One could imagine since this NOTA Forum included a cruise to the Bahamas, that the bag might have also contained sun screen, sun glasses, aloe, some gambling chips from the cruise line to get the attendee started, etc. For the Equinix Ashburn tours in the winter in Virginia, a bus picked up the attendees, handing them a very nice black fleece logo’d jacket to keep them warm for the trip and while waiting outside for the bus to return. For Chicago in the summer, the giveaways included a Pizza Peering theme T-shirt, highlighting many types of peers as toppings on a pizza menu. These themes help reinforce the theme of the conference, and if done well, these giveaways represent a personal benefit to the attendee that decides (and successfully argues that they ought) to attend the forum.
•Quality Polo, Tshirt, long sleeve shirt as appropriate for the climate. Here again, quality is essential ($30 each in quantity). We like the NZNOG Polo shirt made of honeycombed mesh cotton as an example. It is lightweight, packs small, and doesn’t get wrinkled and is likely to get worn. -- Idea from Jonny Martin who did this for NZNOG
•Pad of 8.5 x 11 paper with a solid thick cardboard backing so that it can be taken out and written on while standing up. This can be logo’d with the event, dates, location. Waterman Pens engraved of course for writing, perhaps supplemented by LiveScribe smart pens and notebooks for electronic storage of meeting notes.
While perhaps cost prohibitive, the idea of including logo’d and engraved macbook airs in the laptop bag, preloaded with software, training material, video tutorials on various topics, welcome messages from the organizers, product spreadsheets, presentations, large video files, etc. is particularly appealing and will certainly increase the buzz for the following meeting. It is also a great way to incorporate social software to facilitate the meetings of folks interested in various things - kind of like an electronic bulletin board showing the ad hoc meetings, dinners, socials, etc. Having the software pre-loaded and configured removes some logistics hurdles.
Are these Bribes? Yes, there is an important word of caution here. Whenever the employee benefits (like giveaways at a forum) and there is an expense to the employer (flight to the forum, hotel, taxis, food, etc.) there may be a justifiable concern that all of this represents a bribe intended to curry favor with the attendees. A few people for example decided to attend the NOTA Forum during the day, but did not go on the sponsored cruise/social to the Bahamas. Some companies are more sensitive to this than others and may error on the side of caution to avoid the perception of impropriety. It is a difficult line to draw.
Giveaway Summary – all of these giveaways start the forum off to the right start. People will dig through their bags, discovering the goodies, talking about what is on the USB sticks, etc. Logistically bundling these things together in a bag speeds the registration process. The viral marketing accomplished by the bags, the USB sticks, etc. are proportional to the amount of time these things are seen by others. Others should become envious that they missed the forum and will try and curry favor with the organizers to make sure they get an invitation to the next Ideal Peering Forum. We want the attendees to recall in their discussions with other peers the Ideal Peering Forum event location, dates or at least year, and the best way to do this is with great usable giveaways. Peering Coordinators often recall the presentations and the event by the location or the social event, things memorable at the forum. This is something that can be socially engineered.
The Food Service at the Ideal Peering Forum
When you walk toward the room you notice a massive food and beverage selection on the table. The ideal Peering Forum has drinks available all day, not only at selected breaks. This forum is socially engineered to have the expected ad hoc breaks to have a discussion outside. We are trying to facilitate these interactions, and the break areas are the place to do this. In a variety of geographically dispersed break areas will be
•Coffee, variety of teas and chai, espresso drinks, all available in decaffeinated form.
•Fresh squeezed fruit juices
•Fresh vegetable drinks
•Bottled water and varieties of soda
•Healthy snacks as well as indulgent ones
Why focus on food and drink? At conferences, attendees are asked to wake up early (depending on timezone of origin) to drink up coffee and eat sugared sweets, and are then expected to sit still and listen actively to presentations. This works for a short while until the sugar crash occurs; the point is, these foods and drinks are universally delivered at conferences but are not conducive to the expected behavior. Therefore we need to provide and promote foods that help keep folks awake -- perhaps even educate the audience as to the benefits of longer tern sustainable energy foods and why the forum will make sure they are available.
This issue is particularly important in the afternoon. After lunch conference attendees suffer from ‘food-coma’, a sleep-like hypnotic effect that renders all but the most energized presentations incomprehensible. Heavy snacks for afternoon breaks such as brownies and ice cream have a similar negative effect when you want an attentive audience. Managing food is an easy way to indirectly improve the forum experience.
Also note that the first days of a conference have a more attentive audience, while later days the attention span drifts off. The number of attendees decreases over time as well, so a generally larger and more attentive audience is found in the early part of the first days.
Room Layout of the Ideal Peering Forum
The Ideal Peering Forum is held in a theatre-style venue with each row of seats descending down to a stage where the presenters present. George Washington University has such a theater and worked quite well for NANOG. Such accommodations are rarely available, so we will focus on the best practices assuming that the ideal peering forum is held in a hotel.
Classroom style with tables is used to facilitate note taking and use of laptop computers. There are two screens set as high up as practicable so all seats have an unobstructed view of the entire screen.
Each seat has access to power and hard wire Internet access via Ethernet plug for laptop users. Wireless may be substituted.
Video monitors on the floor in front of the speakers allowing them to always face forward, and to avoid them turning their heads to the side to view the slides on the screen which points their head away from the clip on microphones. The second monitor shows a countdown timer so the speaker knows how much time is left in their slot. The background color coding is Green until 5 minutes are left, Yellow until 2 minutes are left, and Red when 2 minutes or less are left. -- These best practices come from Next Generation Network conferences
There is a ‘green room’ where the speakers are wired such that the wiring is not easily viewable by the audience, nor is the microphone likely to be accidentally pulled out.
Each speaker has a bottle of water available on the table next to the podium should they need one during their talk. Each session should have a case of bottled water available so no one is ever looking around for bottles of water if a room monitor happens to be absent.
All (draft versions of the) talks are preloaded onto the presentation laptop, but presenters are allowed to update their preso up to the break before their presentation begins. In some case they may use their own laptop, but this is minimized to keep the speaker flow smooth and quick. The preferred method of updating slides is USB copying to the presentation machine with a quick walk through to make sure the transitions and animations etc. work as expected. This walkthrough detects the situation where a presenters newly linked file is absent from the shared laptop.
A transition title slide exists for each speaker showing a photo of the speaker and the title of their talk, with a URL linking to the presentation. This is especially helpful for the attendees viewing this cover slide as a thumbnail mode on their computers.
The laptops the audience uses have the ability to automatically follow along with the slides being presented by the speaker, with a notes page on the side for taking notes during the presentation. A forum wide instant message chat room is used for audience members to chat and ask questions during the presentation. A moderator will make sure this doesn’t get out of hand.
Agenda Selection
By far the most important preparation step of a successful Ideal Peering Forum is the agenda selection and its ability to pull together the right people into the room. To this end, select speakers who;
•Are social centers – they will bring/encourage others in the community to attend
•Are good speakers and have given talks in the past of interest to this crowd. Their talk title, their name, their contacts, their reputation will help attendees justify attending the conference. Think of the attendee asking their boss to attend: ‘What will you and the company get out of it?’
•Bring some topical material of interest to the crowd. For example, Todd Underwood from Renesys gave a last minute talk at NANOG about the recent level 3 – cogent de-peering. This is an area of interest to this crowd and was especially topical – it generated over 150 messages on the NANOG mailing list!
•Interactive Talks – find talks that have audience involvement. Examples: The Peering Simulation Game is a live simulation that brings audience members on stage to play the game. This successfully draws the audience in, and an on-line version would involve them even further. Another example is Peering Personals – a chance for the audience members to make a 2 minute ad hoc introduction of themselves. These are more dynamic, more unpredictable and more memorable than canned and approved presentations normally brought to these conferences.
Breaks and Socials
The breaks and socials are the most important times to accomplish the primary goals of the peering forum. The ideal peering Forum is careful to keep speakers on topic and on time, with the more controversial and those that inspire follow up conversations occurring just before the breaks and socials. Channeling these heated discussions and debates is a primary goal of the peering forum organizer.
Survey Forms
Surveys are on-line and hard copies are placed on each seat in the room at the breaks before the speakers for that session will speak. Each section of speakers has its own sections on the survey form so people who need to leave early are filling out the forms for the talks they heard. Some enticement is used to get survey forms filled out such as a raffle for an iPod, noise reduction headphones, PDA, etc. something that helps those who travel a lot.
Location, Access
The hotel is be reachable via a max of two plane segments from most origins, and be easy to get to from the airport. Directions and options for housing are listed on the event web site, complete with price points and pros and cons for each hotel based on personal experience. If possible, limos should be arranged from the airports to the venue for people traveling on the same plane together - start the social side early.
Social
Great care should be taken to select a social that accomplishes the following goals:
1.Encourages the interaction between the attendees
2.highlights an aspect of the location
3.is memorable – many times the event is remembered based on the social
We could go on - there are tons of execution ideas.
Consider these to be some ideas derived from some of the best practices of various operations forums around the world.
Dr Peering
The Ideal Peering Forum (Part 2 of 2)
March 17, 2010
A frog meditates on what the best Peering Forum in the World looks like.
The 2014 Internet Peering Playbook
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The 2013 Internet Peering Playbook
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