Re: [ericas] Stuck getting visas for IETF meetings

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

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).

-- 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.

Just brainstorming, but maybe there is something useful here.

Grüße, Carsten