Re: [Mtgvenue] Update of RFC8719 not needed

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Friday, December 29, 2023 14:08 +0100 Vittorio Bertola
<vittorio.bertola=[e-mail]> wrote:

>> Il 28/12/2023 18:24 CET John Levine <[e-mail]> ha
>> scritto:
>> 
>> I don't see the point, other to reinforce the reality that the
>> sensible places to meet are in the northern hemisphere. We
>> already know that people in South America can remotely attend
>> meetings in North America at hours when they would normally
>> be awake, people in Africa and the Middle East can remotely
>> attend Europe and people in Oceania can remotely attend
>> Japan, Taiwan, or Korea.
> 
> I don't have a strong opinion yet, but... It doesn't make much
> sense to say that we need to meet in person to be effective,
> but also that not meeting in certain parts of the world is not
> a problem for participants who live there because they can
> attend remotely. Pick one.

One can turn that around a bit in a way that is more consistent
but, perhaps, even more complicated and difficult....

First, even though I have been able to attend very few in-person
meetings in the last few years (I think none since the onset of
COVID, but only a small fraction of them before that), I still
recognize the value and increased effectiveness of those
meetings.  And, while I think our mechanisms and tools for
remote participation are much better than they were a decade
ago, they still are not nearly good enough to be a complete
substitute for face to face meetings and discussions.  What
makes that even more complicated is that we seem to have shifted
away from a reliance on email for discussing and working out
issues -- traditionally a technology that is fully asynchronous,
insensitive to location and time zones, and that even enables
those who are not completely comfortable in English to translate
and refine text at their leisure -- to more real time
interactions that, at least from my perspective, often combines
the worst characteristics of in-person meetings with the worst
one of email.  In the process, we have turned many of our email
interactions into fast-reaction messages of no more than a few
sentences and "if anyone has objections, speak up" ratification
of discussions and decisions made elsewhere and in real-time.

The combination of all of that suggests some very complex
tradeoffs that, at least IMO, we are not getting right.  Rather
than addressing them as part of a system and trying to find the
right balance, we often seem to focus on one corner of the
system, ignore everything else, and act surprised when it does
not solve the whole problem.

>> Since IETF meetings are working sessions, if someone is not
>> already reading and writing I-Ds and following the mailing
>> lists, a physical meeting is a waste of time. I entirely
>> agree that it would be good to have more IETFers from places
>> beyond where we come from now, but first we get people
>> active, then we might consider adjusting the meeting
>> schedules to match the places where active workers are.
 
> This is going to be a philosophical (political?) debate
> between those who think that representation should match
> current reality and those who think that it should match a
> desired reality which can only come true if under-represented
> groups get disproportionately higher representation right now.
> I suspect that there will never be consensus on this point -
> not in this organization.

I agree about the lack of consensus but, again, see other
dimensions of the problem.  While details of their
characteristics differ with, e.g., geography, the two most
underrepresented groups we have are (i) people whose experience
with the Internet is solely through phones or maybe small
tablets and perhaps with IoT devices that they don't really see
as part of the Internet, but who have little or no experience
with full-featured devices with keyboards, etc., and the ability
to run applications other than web browser and (ii) people with
no real interest in the technology other than it does what they
want it to do. Those groups overlap somewhat but not completely.
On the one hand, the IETF suffers badly from the absence of
those perspectives.  On the other, getting people from either or
both groups to contribute usefully involves issues that our
"newcomer" and "outreach" efforts don't even begin to address in
useful ways.

best,
   john