Re: [Mtgvenue] Venue 'requirements' language

[Dave Crocker <[e-mail]>]

On 10/31/2016 10:46 AM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> The reason I, at least, worked on the draft we submitted was that I
> felt draft-baker-mtgvenue-iaoc-venue-selection-process had two issues:
> too many things listed, and no guidance for the IAOC to understand
> when it had done the right thing.
>
> This "do the right thing" problem is I think part of the issue we've
> faced.  The IAOC knows there are a bunch of things to take into
> account.  What it does not know is how to balance the various things
> against each other, and as a result it sometimes just blows it and
> everyone gets angry.
>
> I thought that a way to answer that was to give an ordered list of
> priorities.

Ahh.  Sorry.  I, for one, managed to miss that this was meant as an 
ordered list.

While I laud the intent, alas, I don't think the community has anything 
approaching a priority-ranked model of such issues.  Not at any one 
moment in time, and certainly not stable across time.

I think we can reasonably list a set of things that are 
important-but-imprecise.  (I find myself thinking of them as subject to 
'clinical' assessments.) I think we can develop a sense of "normal" 
choices for these and maybe a sense of "reasonable" tradeoffs within 
that normal.

And after that I think the best we can do is have staff formulate 
proposals and seek counsel from the community.

The real contribution of the list, then, would be to flag the areas of 
concern that require this sort of clinical processes between staff and 
community.


> This would mean that a venue that satisfied them all
> would be preferable to one that didn't, but if the IAOC couldn't get
> everything then it would be in a position to tell the community, "We
> tried, we couldn't get everything, and here's the way we decided
> (which has consensus)."

I suspect we disagree, for most of these.  Some, sure.  Others, no.

If an area is deemed unsafe we don't meet there.  The squishiness is the 
assessment of safety.  If a city is too difficult to reach or too 
expensive, we don't meet there.  The squishiness in the assessments of 
difficulty and cost.  If the entry barriers are deemed to onerous, we 
don't meet there.  The squishiness...

That is, these types of issue can trade amongst themselves to a degree, 
perhaps, but with some very basic limits -- except we don't know what 
those limits are and they probably change over time. (sigh.)  Somewhat 
more remote, for somewhat less expensive, for example.  But not /too/ 
remote.

We can perhaps vary within the item, but we can't dismiss it entirely.


> An alternative is, I suppose, to list the criteria that must somehow
> be satisfied and to describe what satisfaction looks like without
> specifying the particular satisfaction mechanism.  The problem with
> that, of course, is that it puts the squishiness issue back onto the
> IAOC and makes way for these sorts of dispute in the future, too.  But
> at least there's an unambiguous list of what must be achieved.

Hence the model of a stable "normal" range of tradeoffs, with community 
consultation when thinking it useful to go outside that range.  This, I 
think, reflects what has been happening with some success.

My sense is that the failure was that we didn't adequately document what 
needed to be considered, rather than that the considerations were flawed.

(I think the considerations were often deemed seriously flawed, a decade 
or more ago, but that the recent track record has been notably better. 
My assessment some years ago was that we averaged a community blow up 
almost every year.  The rate is /much/ lower now...)

d/
-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net