Venue definition and distribution comments summary (was Re: [Mtgvenue] Last Call: <draft-ietf-mtgvenue-meeting-policy-04.txt> (High level guidance for the meeting policy of the IETF) to Best Current Practice)

[Suresh Krishnan <[e-mail]>]

Hi all,
  I have seen messages from Russ Housley, Andrew Sullivan, Eric Rescorla, Richard Barnes, Cullen Jennings, Ted Lemon, Lou Berger, John Levine, Adam Roach, Brian Carpenter, Stephen Farrell, Mark Nottingham, Melinda Shore, Tom Petch, Charles Eckel, Fred Baker, Randy Bush, Jeff Tantsura and Lloyd Wood on these two topics. Thank you very much for your inputs.  Summarizing till now, I do see three major items that have come up.

a) Change “Asia” to “Asia Pacific” - this seems pretty reasonable and non-controversial

b) Better definition of the regions - I did ask the WG several times but my read of the WG opinion was that this was not considered desirable. Will look for further guidance from the WG, chairs, and AD on this regard. 

(As background information. the draft had earlier suggested defining the regions based on either the distribution of RIRs (e.g.  ARIN/RIPE/APNIC/LACNIC/AfriNIC) or the UN statistical department's classification of macro geographical regions.)

c) The 1:1:1 ratio not being representative of the participation - I am realizing now that the text in the draft might have made this sound like a rigid requirement that needs to be satisfied without weighing the factors in venue-selection-process. At least from my point of view as document editor this was not the intent and I apologize for not making this more apparent. This was intended to be something we aspire for, but difficulties in venue selection specifically for the Asia meetings have meant that in practice we are far from this distribution. As a data point, over the past 30 non-* meetings *ONLY 6* have been in Asia (13 in North America and 11 in Europe). I can propose some text to make it clear that this policy needs to be seen in the context of venue-selection-process along the lines suggested by Andrew. 

Does that sound sufficient to address the distribution ratio, or should we continue to further discuss putting in a different ratio?

Thanks
Suresh