[Mtgvenue] Issue #21: unfiltered should be mandatory (was: Re: issue #3: Too many mandatory)

[Eliot Lear <[e-mail]>]

Editor hat firmly off.

Please see below.

On 4/6/17 5:37 PM, Alissa Cooper wrote:
> The full text of this one is:
>
> The Facility directly provides, or permits and facilitates, the
> delivery of a high performance, robust, unfiltered and unmodified IETF
> Network.
>
> Personally I think this should be a mandatory criterion, i.e. we
> should not select a venue that cannot provide this. If this needs to
> reference the meeting network requirements document to provide the
> objective criteria by which it will be judged, that would be fine, I
> think. 
>

I agree that this one should be Mandatory, and propose to make it so in
the next version of the document.  My logic is as follows:

  * It can generally be determined when a network is filtered, and so
    it's an easy criteria at least to provide an objective answer to.
  * As a matter of course, people working at the IETF have to
    communicate with both their companies and their customers in
    confidence, and they could be anywhere.  In this sense, I don't
    think we can run a successful meeting without such unfettered access.
  * We tend to eat our own dog food, and as such need necessary network
    access to conduct experiments.

It may strike people as odd as to why I wouldn't argue the same for the
other network requirements.  We had a discussion about this in Chicago,
and there was some hope of using a network requirements doc from the NOC
folk.  Unfortunately that doc is not kept up to date.  As such, while I
think we might reasonably all agree that having a functioning network is
quite important, it's actually quite hard to direct the IAOC to provide
such a thing without the requirements reading as trivially true.  If the
requirement isn't observably true or false, we should probably not make
it mandatory.  Moreover, the NOC is really an organ of the IAOC, and
referencing their document in order to have them tell us to direct them
seems just a bit circular.

Eliot