Re: Last Call: <draft-ietf-mtgvenue-meeting-policy-04.txt> (High level guidance for the meeting policy of the IETF) to Best Current Practice

[Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]>]

Andrew,

Thanks for raising this.

While the stated rationale in S 2. is to spread travel pain around,
I don't really think this gets us to 1-1-1-*.

First, if you look at historical demographics, over the past 12 IETFs,
we have 23% Asia, 26% Europe, and 42% NA). Put another way, the last
time we had > 1/3 Asian attendance was IETF 94 in Yokohama, and the
last time we had less than 1/3 NA attendance was IETF 79 in Beijing.
So, a policy that was designed to match per-continent attendance would
be more like 2-1-1-*.

Second, continent is not a very good proxy for travel pain, both
because Asia is so large (for instance, the shortest Tokyo to
Singapore route is 7:25 out and 7:10 back (on JAL) and the shortest
Tokyo - Honolulu route (ANA) is 7:20/8:10, so not really much
different at all) and because flight connections are such a big
contributor ( for instance, SFO-BKK is almost 20 hours, whereas
SFO-NRT is 11).

Bottom line, if this is supposed to be real requirements rather
than just aspirations, I think it needs a rethink.

-Ekr


On Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 6:34 PM, Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> Dear IESG,
>
> On Thu, Apr 05, 2018 at 01:12:40PM -0700, The IESG wrote:
> >
> > The IESG has received a request from the Meeting Venue WG (mtgvenue) to
> > consider the following document: - 'High level guidance for the meeting
> > policy of the IETF'
> >   <draft-ietf-mtgvenue-meeting-policy-04.txt> as Best Current Practice
>
> In a recent discussion, the IAOC came to realise that the documents
> draft-ietf-mtgvenue-iaoc-venue-selection-process and
> draft-ietf-mtgvenue-meeting-policy may be in some tension.  One of
> them requires the IASA to balance meeting venues over time, and the
> other has requirements that a meeting must meet.
>
> One possible difficulty that arises from the combination is if one
> region turns out to be vastly more expensive than others.  In that
> case, some criteria for each venue may not be met in one region.  The
> result might also be financially ruinous for the IETF in general.
>
> The current IAOC interprets the drafts such that any of the criteria
> except those in section 3.1 of
> draft-ietf-mtgvenue-iaoc-venue-selection-process may be traded against
> any other, over several years if need be, in order to meet the
> geographic distribution policy described in
> draft-ietf-mtgvenue-meeting-policy.  Assuming the documents are
> published as they are currently written, we will use that
> interpretation as governing IASA implementation decisions.  It is
> worth noting that, among the criteria that could be traded are those
> of affordability.  If that is not the interpretation of the IETF
> community, then some clarification is needed to the text.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Andrew Sullivan
> for the IAOC
>
> --
> Andrew Sullivan
> [e-mail]
>
>