Re: [ericas] IETF Meeting in South America

[S Moonesamy <[e-mail]>]

Hi Melinda,
At 14:17 23-05-2013, Melinda Shore wrote:
>I continue to think that we need to keep our focus on increasing
>participation from those areas.  If having a meeting there helps
>solve that problem, outstanding.  If having a meeting there doesn't
>help, well, there we are.

Agreed.

A meeting by itself will only bring one-off participation (people 
attend the meeting and disappear after that).  In my opinion the IETF 
would not consider that as participation.

If after having a meeting in South America there is no significant 
increase in participation it is improbable that there will be more 
meetings in that region.  People can find reasons for the lack of 
participation but that won't help much.

There was a stalemate in a WG discussion last year.  An alternative 
to resolve that was to have a face-to-face discussion at the next 
IETF meeting.  The issue was not resolved through a vote or a 
hum.  Working group participants had to express their opinion so that 
the Working Group Chairs could find an acceptable way to resolve the 
issue.  That required having the people who were participating in the 
mailing list discussions in the room.  If these people cannot come to 
a meeting in South America it is a problem as the work of the working 
group has to be delayed or else the working group has to be shut down.

There was an IETF interim meeting which coincided with a RIPE (RIR) 
meeting.  The interim meeting (see 
draft-jaeggli-interim-observations-01) was a failure.  My guess is 
that it would likely be the same if the interim meeting was held 
together with a LACNIC meeting.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy