Re: Interim step on meetings site feedback for sites currently under active consideration

[Adam Roach <[e-mail]>]

On 4/21/16 09:54, Ted Lemon wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 21, 2016 at 10:50 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker 
> <[e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
>
>     I think people are missing the point of the 'world tour'. It is not
>     just what happens inside the IETF that is important, it is the
>     perception of the IETF in other forums. In particular government
>     forums.
>
>
> +1
>
> However, I think what Melinda is saying and what you are saying are 
> not in conflict.   We have a problem in the IETF that in-person 
> attendance counts for too much.   This is a real problem.   We should 
> do something about it.

I agree with you to this point. I've seen the importance of the 
in-person meetings gradually increase over the past 18 years, and I 
think it would be great if we could reverse the trend. That's going to 
require a cultural shift, and those are notoriously difficult to effect. 
So if you want this to change, focus on changing the participant 
culture. It's going to be long, and it's going to be hard.

> Then the question of whether to do world tours becomes more of a 
> logistical/financial issue, which is really what it should be.

Sure. For any single, established bit of work, this is largely true 
(given sufficiently rich tools to interact and sufficient will to make 
concessions to time zones), and we can work to make this more true than 
it is today.

What the in-person meetings provide is cross-pollination, in the form of 
hallway conversations and attendees sitting in on working groups that 
operate on the periphery of their area of interest. It allows people to 
identify similarities and trends that would be difficult or impossible 
to spot with simple mailing list participation. I'm not claiming that 
people who participate remotely are necessarily less effective. However, 
the IETF needs a critical mass of these pollinators to spread ideas around.

It's also pretty evident that these cross-pollinators are going to get 
value from the experience of conversing with people on the edges of 
their area of work, both in the form of intel and in the form of 
bringing their own interests and needs into the synthesis of the ideas 
they're coming across. This lets them propose new areas of work that 
benefit groups they care about.

My earlier point was mostly that the trip to BA provided an entirely new 
set of people -- people with as much of a stake in the Internet as 
anyone else -- the opportunity to be these pollinators, both providing 
and generating the benefits I describe above. And that's something we 
should care about. Even if the basic tenets of fairness don't compel 
some people, at least the selfish interest of bringing fresh ideas -- 
and fresh syntheses of ideas -- into the IETF should have clear value.

There's also clear growing interest on behalf of South Americans to get 
involved: it is the only continent that has shown a steady 
meeting-over-meeting increase in attendance over the past seven meetings 
(as measured by percentage of attendees) [1].

Perhaps the right metric is not whether these same people attend 
subsequent meetings in destinations that are remote from their home 
territory, but whether they continue their involvement by participating 
remotely and (to a lesser degree) whether they return to the next 
face-to-face meeting held on their home continent.

Based on the foregoing, I assert that putting effort into observing the 
impact of this kind of excursion from our normal travel pattern has 
value, and that it should inform future venue selection discussions.

/a

____
[1] See 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/fosw7dcwih0dqvz/attendance-by-continent.png?dl=0