Re: [Mtgvenue] I-D Action: draft-ietf-mtgvenue-iaoc-venue-selection-process-14.txt

[Stewart Bryant <[e-mail]>]

It seems to me that "no-smoking" is a pretty standard policy and 
relatively simple to include and to police.

Beyond that, unless a more practical assessment method can be proposed, 
best effort is all we can do.

- Stewart


On 10/05/2018 09:25, Eliot Lear wrote:
> Hi,
>
> <editor hat firmly OFF>
>
> As the person who caused this stink by adding supporting the no smoking
> requirement (again with editor hat off), I think Andrew's way forward is
> the best.
>
> Eliot
>
>
> On 10.05.18 04:14, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>> Dear colleagues,
>>
>> Mary's, Ted's, and Ole's discussion of particulars of environmental
>> contaminents (in this case, smoking and mo[u]ld) makes me again wish
>> to suggest the position I held before the specific change was made to
>> draft-ietf-mtgvenue-iaoc-venue-selection-process-14.  My position at
>> the time was that the Important criterion
>>
>>     o  Economic, safety, and health risks associated with this Venue are
>>        acceptable.
>>
>> was what we needed.  It was pretty unlikely to be traded off with any
>> kind of regularity, since "risk" and "acceptable" were sufficiently
>> flexible that we'd need to call out things that were in stark contrast
>> to what we normally dealt with.  In any case, I thought, further
>> specification would be a problem.  Therefore, I claimed, the above
>> criterion was as good as anyone could reasonably expect and it seemed
>> that the details needed to be left to meeting planners.  (I didn't
>> support it becoming Mandatory because the "are acceptable" language
>> means that there's no test, so no way to know whether the Venue
>> necessarily fails.)
>>
>> We are now in the situation where we have a Mandatory criterion about
>> smoking in various parts of the Venue, and at least one person who
>> claims that such a Mandatory criterion requires site-visiting staff to
>> do some kinds of spot checks.  It's totally unclear to me what that
>> would mean or what we would do if, 2 or more years later when we
>> actually show up, the spot checks turn out to have been wrong.
>>
>> We are now also faced with the suggestion that the same staff are
>> supposed to do mo[u]ld tests without having the requisite training or
>> hazardous materials equipment.  If in fact we are demanding staff do
>> such things, it seems to me at least plausible that staff would have a
>> future complaint if we did not provide them with appropriate equipment
>> to undertake the tests.  This is, I think, an important reason why we
>> cannot realistically mandate such tests.
>>
>> Moreover, once we begin requiring such tests by staff, there are other
>> pollutants that (1) could be required to be tested and (2) are not yet
>> mentioned in the document, either because we haven't yet thought of
>> (or discovered) them or because someone who is affected wasn't
>> involved in all this.
>>
>> Therefore, I would like again to propose that we go back to the
>> previous text -- which had the nice advantage too of having had
>> consensus in the WG -- and drop the new Mandatory criterion in section
>> 3.1, relying on staff to do their level best (as they ever have done)
>> to address health issues that are likely to affect IETF participants
>> at meetings.
>>
>> None of this, please note, is in any way intended to minimise or
>> denigrate the health issues (or even discomforts, for all that) people
>> have talked about.  But we need a document that establishes
>> principles, not rules.  If one's particular concern cannot be covered
>> under the principles laid out, then I think it would be most important
>> to raise that.  But this particular change seems to me to be the
>> addition of a specific rule where an exising principle in the document
>> was already adequate to the purpose.
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> A
>>
>