Re: [Mtgvenue] Was Brisbane a success to be repeated ?

[Jay Daley <[e-mail]>]

Hi Toerless

> On 24 Mar 2024, at 21:38, Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> Sorry if subject question was asked and answered elswhere/earlier, please
> provide pointers to summary thereof. If not:
> 
> Who will atually determine if Brisbane was a success to be repeted, and if so how ?

There are multiple evaluations after a meeting, and as these are basically independent of each other I can only speak about the administrative evaluation.  This evaluation has a number of parts to it:

- Financial.  It should be noted that we went into this with a budgeted deficit and so the evaluation is not about surplus/deficit but about how close to budget it was.  Of course, if it was financially better than budget then that is a bonus.  it can take several months, sometimes over a year for the actual costs of a meeting to be known, if we have local tax compliance to address.  We have only recently published final financial statements for the 2022 meetings, and are still working on those from 2023.  We hope to have a draft financial statement for Brisbane in a few months.

- Satisfaction.  As you know, we survey meeting participants with questions on a wide range of meeting features and we publish a blog post with the results of those surveys that show a comparison with previous meetings.  The goal is for a consistent upward trend of satisfaction and considerable effort is put into achieving that by changing the meeting experience in response to the feedback received.

- Operations.  While this is not something that participants see directly, there are many operational factors that are evaluated after the meeting, including the support from the venue, any incidents, the quality of the AV team, food management and so on.

One other things the LLC is doing here, is collecting data that can be used by the community and/or community leadership to evaluate a meeting.  For example, a few people asserted that this meeting had a lower level participation from civil society because of the cost of travel, and so we have added questions to the post-meeting survey that will enable this assertion to be tested once we have the data from a few meetings.

> 
> I guess it comes down to some type of evaluating whether it managed to
> pull in participants that otherwise would not go to other IETF in person;

I don’t think that it does.  Experience of exploratory meetings has shown that much more needs to happen around the meeting if this is to a goal, much of which is out of the scope of the IETF (e.g. a planned local outreach program).  This is more about spreading the pain. 

> and to an extend that justifies the lack of all the participants that did not
> come - but that would have come to other alternative locations) due to long and expensive travel.
> 
> I answered the post-meeting survey but did not think it had enough questions to
> help figuring out answeres to these questions. Especially did i not see a survey
> for those people who did not make it to Brisbane (e.g.: sent to [e-mail])
> and would like to chime in to the evaluation.

The survey does go to people who participated remotely, so this survey only excludes those that did not participate at all.  We ask those that participated remotely if they would have participated onsite and why they didn’t, with cost as one of the options.

We have a separate survey under development for people who cease participating in meetings to see why they did that. 

> 
> Btw: I very much enjoyed Brisbane, but i was privileged in having to fly in only
> from a location (SFO) that had a direct connection of <= 14 hours, whereas colleagues
> from further east in the Americas and of course in Europe did report total travel
> times even in excess of 30 hours. And i also managed to attach vacations to make
> the travel very much worthwhile. And i do collaborate a lot with folks from east asia,
> who of course also had a good presence.
> 
> That's especially why i would like to understand best how much effort the IETF puts into
> deciding for this type of locations

This meeting followed the process for an exploratory meeting in RFC 8719 - someone proposed Australia to the list, there was a discussion and the IETF Chair called consensus.  The role of the LLC/Secretariat here was to choose the city.

> and especially how it will justify it to those for
> whom it was inacceptable due to these travel issues.

I don’t think any justification is needed - every single venue we could/do choose will exclude/hinder some people.  That is just a matter of fact and one that has been discussed extensively in the context of visas.  Where would need to justify decisions, is if the same set of people are always excluded/hindered.

cheers
Jay 

> 
> Thanks a lot for any insights!
>    Toerless
> 
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-- 
Jay Daley
IETF Executive Director
[e-mail]