Re: IETF 100 Registration and Hotel Reservations Open!

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On Jul 26, 2017, at 12:07 PM, Stewart Bryant <[e-mail]> wrote:
> I wonder if we need a ballot system for the HQ hotels?

Right now the system rewards those who are most attuned to the timing of the hotel announcement.   I actually have a filter in my email that notifies me when the announcement comes out.

I think it can definitely be argued that this is the wrong way to do things—I don't see it as being a particularly fair outcome that those IETF participants who are most proactive about signing up always tend to win.   Suppose everyone who cares about this were as proactive as I am.   Then it would just be a little bit more random who happened to win.

So, in principle, a lottery would be better, and maybe you get extra tickets if you lost last time (not sure how to make that work, but maybe some of the crypto wizards do).   The problem with this is that it's a _lot_ more tooling work for the secretariat.   I would hazard a guess that this is why it hasn't happened yet.

I don't think it's actually realistic to try to solve this problem.   But it does suck.   I suppose those of us who tend to win most often could voluntarily delay our registrations, but I doubt we could get sufficiently universal cooperation to achieve fairness.