--On Tuesday, September 22, 2020 20:00 +0200 Eliot Lear <lear=40cisco.com@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > >> On 22 Sep 2020, at 17:38, Paul Hoffman >> <paul.hoffman@xxxxxxxx> wrote: >> >> Asking the WG chairs to decide which WG members might be the >> most important is not a good way for the IETF to go. The fact >> that many of the authors and regular list contributors for >> the WG are in one region is irrelevant to the value of a >> meeting. > Yes, but let's not kid ourselves, either: if the key > contributors don't show up it's going to be a pretty > boring meeting, or worse, you end up with consensus decisions > that get overturned in email. Which, of course, is arguably why the "we make decisions on email" principle came from, usually with the intent of we have key discussions on email too. Clearly a judgment call on the part of WG chairs. The problem is that while many (possibly even most) WG chairs will properly balance the desires of those they believe are key contributors with openness to different ideas and perspectives and inclusiveness, especially of newcomers, we have enough experience to know that some won't. The latter cases may not be malicious but merely a different judgment about who it is important to not inconvenience, but it would still leave us with situations I hope we can agree are undesirable. Rotating times to shift the inconvenience around --and even insisting that WGs that hold multiple interims rotate those times-- is a terrible and unpleasant solution. It is also better than any of the plausible alternatives. best, john
