[LUAU] Am I going to TPOSSCON - If not why?

[Clifton Royston]

On Sun, Jan 29, 2006 at 11:17:37PM -1000, Jim Thompson wrote:
> On Jan 29, 2006, at 10:23 PM, Matt Darnell wrote:
> >>I really don't follow this.  For the most part, people did not attend
> >>because of the time of year, time of week, and time of day.  Next  
> >>year
> >>we will do this on Friday and Saturday.
> >
> >I hope changing the day makes a big difference.
> 
> We've had some feedback.  (I saw Scott ask people for it.)   Here is  
> what I remember of it:
> 
> 1)  Don't count on people from off-island attending.   I believe that  
> TPOSSCON has been 'marketed' as "come to Hawaii, enjoy the beach,  
> learn some great stuff, hang out with cool people".   Based on what  
> I've seen over the last two years, and an earlier experience when the  
> IETF held a meeting in
> Honolulu (1989), I don't believe that folks can "sell" their own  
> management on attending a technical conference in Hawaii.

  Yes.  Pat Sullivan of Oceanit and Hoana Medical has made some very
astute and enlightening comments on this, and I have seen it over and
over again in my technical career here.

  Our tourism industry has spent many millions of dollars a year over
many decades to inculcate the image of Hawaii as a place that is
carefree, where no serious work gets done.  If most national executives
and managers have any experience of Hawaii, they think of it as a place
where they had a wonderful time on a honeymoon, or golfing on a
luxurious vacation - this means they reflexively shy away from
associating it with doing serious business.

  A story of my own: When I was with VeriFone and involved in setting
up training for customers' application programmers (major
national/international banks) 8 times out of 10, our customers'
corporate management would not approve sending their programmers to
Hawaii for training as it was automatically viewed as a junket. 
Sometimes when they did send someone, they'd send a non-progamming
manager as a "reward", even though that was useless in helping them get
their applications off the ground.  We ultimately had to move the
application training centers to the mainland.  Eventually the company
headquarters went too, for essentially the same reason.

  This is something we'd better just live with and plan around, because
it will take decades to reverse it.  If you want to work around it, it
will have to be done on a case-by-case basis, using an extensive media
campaign in national tech-oriented media to make the case that this is
different.  If you don't have a budget for that, then focus efforts on
boosting local attendance.
 
  -- Clifton

-- 
    Clifton Royston  --  cliftonr at iandicomputing.com / cliftonr at lava.net
       President  - I and I Computing * http://www.iandicomputing.com/
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