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

[Richard Barnes <[e-mail]>]

Eric and Andrew have hit on a good point here.

It's important for this policy to balance aspirations of a broader
participant base against practical realities of getting work done.  While
we might aspire to a world where a 1-1-1 distribution aligns well with our
participant base and is also cost effective, that appears to be not quite
the world we live in.

I'm fine giving the IAOC the brief to work toward that objective, but if we
do that, we also need to give them the flexibility to make pragmatic
decisions.

--Richard

On Thu, Apr 19, 2018 at 8:36 PM, Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]> wrote:

> 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]
>>
>>
>