Re: Agenda experiment for IETF 103 in November in Bangkok

[Ted Hardie <[e-mail]>]

Howdy,

On Wed, May 16, 2018 at 9:49 AM, John C Klensin <[e-mail]> wrote:

>
> One of my concerns, which parallels your
> comments, is that the more Hackathons and convention-like
> activities (including tutorials, time for essentially
> unconstrained informal gatherings, exhibition areas, etc.), come
> to be considered and seen as important in
> laying out the schedule, the more likely we will see evaluations
> and decisions shift as to who gets support for attendance at
> IETF meetings and how much work people have to do to justify
> that support.


One of the difficulties with English is that it sometimes hard to tell
whether a conjunction is meant to gather things into a set or distinguish
them from each other.  In your comment above you say "Hackathons and
convention-like activities".  I'm hoping that in this case you meant to
distinguish them from each other.

Hackathons are, at least in my opinion, about as far from convention-like
exhibitions as you can get while sharing the same hotel food.  We are
hosting them in part because we want to see decisions shift on who gets
support for attendance, so that folks who are writing the code that
implements and informs our specifications get to come.  We don't want to do
that to disfavor any current attendee, of course, but to broaden the base
of participation in a way that is particularly useful to producing good
standards.

I hope you concur with that goal.

regards,

Ted Hardie