Re: [ericas] Stuck getting visas for IETF meetings

[Vinayak Hegde <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Apr 30, 2013 at 2:58 PM, Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Apr 30, 2013, at 02:37, Vinayak Hegde <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> > Got to live with it
>
> There is not much we can do about the visa complexity at the IETF level.
>
> But we can do two things:
>
> -- collect information about relative levels of complexities exhibited
>    by different venues.  Right now I would guess (but don't know) that
>    it is easier for many to go to Canada than to the US.  But I have
>    no basis for that guess.  The IETF could ask its registrants (I
>    know, biased selection) to rate the visa complexity for each
>    meeting.  We would need to find some objective scale, e.g., total
>    number of hours of work needed to obtain visa.  We would also be
>    interested in the number people who fail to obtain visa (there is
>    some sensitive data here, of course, and some interaction with
>    potential abuse).
>
>
That could possibly help. But I have found that it depends on individuals
as well as whims and fancies of the consulate officers. This is true
everywhere. What could possibly help is the list of docs needed +
approximate time for processing. But that is a lot of work as these things
keep on changing frequently (every couple of years).


> -- find better ways to include people who can't travel to a venue.
>    This is, of course, useful beyond the visa issue.  The visa issue
>    might be a reason to do something specific for a region, say, when
>    we have a meeting in the US, do something specific for people from
>    Pakistan.  I have limited fantasy what that could be.  For people
>    working in my region, I have sometimes wondered whether there is a
>    point convening regional mirror events.  E.g., I could try to
>    assemble people "from" my region (work "from" here) that can't
>    travel abroad, in Bremen and run a parallel event with optimized
>    remote participation, local discussion etc.  Hard to do for me
>    because I'm likely at the main IETF.  But worth a thought.
>    Something that ISOC chapters could do, too.
>
>
I think this is a good idea worth trying. I was thinking on similar lines
to do this in the upcoming IETFs which I will attend remotely.


> Just brainstorming, but maybe there is something useful here.
>
> Grüße, Carsten
>
>