Re: Meeting Venue Preference Survey

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <[e-mail]>]

On 30 aug 2010, at 19:57, Randall Gellens wrote:

>>> 8. Would you attend if we held the IETF in Africa?
>>> 9. Would you attend if we held the IETF in South or Central America?

> Like the question on an earlier survey about Quebec City, I think it requires more information and more individual research to have a good answer.  Which venue in which city?  How hard is it to get to the city and venue?

Basically the only thing the survey gives us is how many people would never go to a meeting on those continents regardless of the particular circumstances. There wasn't even a "why not".

A few months ago the IEEE had its ICC conference in Cape Town. I believe around 800 people attended. For me this was about 13 hours of flying (MAD-AMS-CPT), although there was no timezone change. For someone from North America that would probably be a lot longer. My flight was affordable, but only available during weekends so I was forced to stay a few extra days. I would say that the security situation in Cape Town was barely acceptable, the mobile phone infrastructure wasn't acceptable at all (almost impossible to make international calls over the mobile network, including calls to colleagues also in Cape Town) and internet access was also a huge problem but presumably the IETF or host would take care of that if we were to meet in such a place. If things are so problematic in the safer of the two biggest cities of the richest country of the continent I can't imagine the IETF having a succesful meeting elsewhere on the continent. Of course I can't know for sure after only visiting one city in Africa once.