Re: IETF Attendance by continent

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <[e-mail]>]

On 31 aug 2010, at 1:13, Tobias Gondrom wrote:

> My vote is strongly in favor of 1:1:1.

> 1. First, the location _is_ a significant barrier to entry for newcomers
> and other contributors. Optimizing only for the current status quo does
> create a strong perpetual cycle of self reinforcing structure of
> contributors from the favored location(s).

You assume that having a meeting on your home continent magically makes attending a meeting much easier.

I don't think that's necessarily the case. Just consider the language issue. I think we can safely assume that everyone who thinks about attending IETF meetings speaks English. So attending a meeting in a country where English is the official language is much easier than in a place where few people speak it. Even in the Netherlands, where virtually everyone speaks at least some English, there was a bit of a language barrier because signs, menus, etc where often only available in Dutch.

Also, flying across a big continent can take just as long as flying across an ocean. And although there is a correlation between travel distance and cost, that correlation is well below 1. Sometimes intercontinental flights are the same price or cheaper than regional flights, and often the difference is small enough that it disappears in the noise of hotel prices, ground transportation costs, food expenses and the like.

Last but not least, attendance is only one metric. If it were the only relevant one, we'd have to meet on a Cisco campus once every three years, as about 10% of the attendees are employed by Cisco. Even though Asian attendance has been on the rise, contributions from Asian IETFers seem to be lagging their attendance numbers. (For instance, as far as I can tell from the names, none of the IESG members is from Asia.)

For all these reasons, I think that 1:1:1 is not warrented at this time. Maybe it will be in a few more years, but I think we should first see how well meetings in places like Beijing go before committing to having a meeting in Asia every year. Meeting in Europe seems to lead to compromises. Maybe Asia will turn out to be better in this regard, maybe worse. I don't think we want to have meetings with more compromises just to appear balanced.

> Consider that contributors
> usually start as newcomers, attend several meetings, then write a draft,

I don't know about you, but I wrote drafts before my first meeting.

> join more WGs and maybe chair a WG. But if you make it hard for
> newcomers to attend several meetings they are at a severe disadvantage
> to become future contributors.

If that were true we'd need to go to places where we _don't_ have attendees yet, not to Asia which has been sending a steady supply in recent years.