Re: Venue Announcement for IETFs 98, 99, 102 and 111

[Jari Arkko <[e-mail]>]

First, I wanted to agree with what Lou said - we could do much better
documenting and being transparent about meeting location choices.
Lou is working hard on that in the IAOC, by the way.

Then one specific comment on Tom’s point:

> While useful, many other very successful organizations meet only remotely and have periodic “summits” where people might or might not show up.  All actual work happens using remote tools and meeting venues.  I am not saying one is better than the other, but just that there are existence proofs of organizations working without requiring physical meetings.  I’ve tried to advocate strongly that this organization consider that, at least partially due to all the logistical reasons discussed not to mention the costs associated with physical meetings.

I think this is a bit of a matter of degrees. You could argue that this is
precisely what the IETF does. Most of our work happens on list, on
writing complex documents and sharing them over the net, and
perhaps more recently also in various virtual meetings.

In most organisations people tend to value in-person
communication to some extent, at least from time to time,
including in the organisations that do summits. The
question is to what extent, and I’m reasonably happy with the
IETF tradeoffs in this. But, it is not like that couldn’t be improved
either.

Here’s a question that I think would be worthwhile to consider.
We do create working groups in some cases even without running
a physical BOF meeting, but mostly in cases where the creation of
that working group is a no brainer. What would it take to run the
next interesting/controversial BOF as a virtual meeting? It would
great if we could do this, but I’m not sure it is easy either. (I’m not
trying to eliminate the meetings as a useful venue to do BOFs,
but in many cases the ability to decide the matter when it
comes up as opposed to many months away might be useful
for other reasons.)

Jari