Re: [Mtgvenue] Updated potential meeting location list

[Jay Daley <[e-mail]>]

Replying to a whole bunch of emails:

I have no idea how cities originally got onto this list, or why some cities are not there or why some cities we have been too are no longer there.  I’m also not sure what is assessed at what stage (which I will go away and find out).  The current state is that I’ve inherited an opaque, historical process where the secretariat had done their job some time ago but the list had not been updated and the community not informed, and so I corrected that.

My future focus is on defining an overall assessment pipeline which implements the consensus policy. My initial thoughts about that are that this definition should include:

- how things enter the pipeline.  I expect this will have multiple entry points depending on who is asking and probably different requirements for each, such as:
— sponsors, who offer to pay for specific cities/regions and who will probably have the lowest burden of all
— venues who send us bids with special pricing who will probably have the highest burden and be asked to do substantial work if they want their bid considered
— local community members, who will probably be expected to do some initial research
— community members who have preferred cities for an endless set of reasons
- what stages there are in the assessment and what is assessed at each stage
- what community engagement takes place and when

The detailed assessment process is already in place and ably managed by the secretariat so this will be more an exercise in clear definitions than changing the underlying details.

One exception to that and something you are going to see from me a lot, is that I prefer to use independent empirical data for complex decisions instead of human judgement.  So when it comes to airport links I will be looking to see if there is a public index of airport connectivity that we can refer to.  Similarly, comments have been made about some cities being unsuitable due to air-pollution and I will be looking at the standard air-quality indices to guide us there.  Obviously there are nuances and ranges for which human judgement must be used, but the index should be the starting point not an email thread about the number of flights in/out.

Finally, there are actually two cities listed as unsuitable - Nassau and Macau - for the reasons given in my announcement.

Jay


-- 
Jay Daley
IETF Executive Director
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