Re: [Recentattendees] Background on Singapore go/no go for IETF 100

[Margaret Cullen <[e-mail]>]

> On May 27, 2016, at 12:17 PM, Donald Eastlake <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> The policy was very simply to hold meetings to roughly equalize the
> travel burden on the people who were actually attending the meetings.
> It had nothing to do with diversity. Asia was added to the rotation,
> first as one out of 5 (2-2-1) and then as one out of 3 (1-1-1) after
> Asia attendance actually increased, NOT due to any sort of diversity
> policy or marketing effort. I think that was a good policy, one
> oriented to getting work done. Buenos Aires was a stark exception to
> this policy.

This matches my understanding as well.  We started going to Asia because it wasn’t fair that the Asian participants (who were _already actively participating_) were shouldering a larger travel burden than attendees from North America and Europe.

Before we regularly start traveling to other regions of the world on a regular basis as a means of increasing the geographical diversity of our attendees, i would like to see two things happen:

(1) I would like us to use Buenos Aires as an experiment and actually track how many of the local first-time attendees continue to be active participants (write to mailing lists, author drafts, attend other meetings in person or remotely) over the next 6-to-12 months, so that we can see if traveling to a new region of the world actually works to recruit more participants from that area.

(2) Discuss, within the IETF, whether the costs of doing this (financial and logistical) are worth the benefits, AFTER we know what those benefits are from completing step 1.

Margaret