Re: IETF Meeting Venue Selection Criteria

Brian,

>>> What is the evidence that we will not gain that new
>>> participation without hurting current participation
>>> by primary contributors?
> It's very hard to get those data... There is no objective way to 
> identify 'primary
> contributors' other than by assuming the regular attendees are
> also contributors.
> ...
> Which, BTW, means income that we badly need.
> ...
> We also badly need hosts for financial reasons.

Unfortunately, the ultimate and practical meaning, of these kinds of 
conclusions about venue selection, is that we do not place productivity 
as a high priority.  We have a collection of other priorities that take 
precedence, for a collection of reasons. This means that the impact of 
face-to-face meetings, on productivity and quality, is almost entirely a 
matter of luck.

I should note that this is a similar problem with respect to Nomcom 
member selection:  We use highly indirect criteria, because they are 
easy to administer, but which are certain to have poor correlation with 
member expertise about IETF management -- although IETF management is 
what is being chosen -- and then we hope for the best.

It is interesting that essentially all public discussion of these sorts 
of stategic issues and the criteria for pursuing them almost always 
focuses on what is easy or already established, rather than what will 
work best for achieving the desired result.  In particular, negative 
implications appear to be entirely ignored, such as the one Eric Rosen 
just pointed out, about encouraging participation by professional 
standards goers.

For an organization that claims to care about the quality of its work 
product, this all seems a rather strange approach to its management. 

I suspect that organizations rarely achieve their primary goals by 
making strategic and tactical decisions that ignore those goals.

d/

p.s.  "Primary contributors" could be operationally defined as previous 
IETF attendees who are authors or chairs of current work.  One might 
always want to factor in mailing list activity levels for some 
individuals, but that's also an indirect measure.  However, all involve 
objective data that are available.  An additional approach is a 
variation on something that is already done:  Currently, some 
participants are queried for schedule conflicts within the IETF week.  
That could be extended to "venue conflicts" which would prevent them 
from attending at all.    And the primary point behind my making these 
suggests is to point out that it is easy to give up on pursuing criteria 
that are not trivial to enforce, but that that is not always warranted...

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