Dear Lars, WG chairs, and IESG colleagues,
I note that the updated guidance has the following statement:
"If invitation letters are required for visa purposes, the host of the
meeting needs to be able to issue those to all interested in-person
participants."
I believe that this has been wrongly decided. First, this assumes that every meeting has a host, where this is not evident. A working group could agree on a venue and the participants could agree to share costs or donate funds for its rental, without there being any organization other than the working group involved. In those cases, does the IESG empower the WG to issue the letters of invitation? Or do you expect the invitations to come from the rented venue?
Second, this confuses the purpose of a host and the purpose of a meeting. In some cases, the host will specifically disclaim the need to follow the typical procedures for attending a meeting in their facilities (e.g. NDAs), because they recognize that is a meeting of the IETF rather than a meeting with them as an organization. Meta has just kindly agreed to this for the upcoming MoQ interim, waiving their typical site visit NDA for pre-registered attendees, but I suspect it would have been harder going to persuade them of this if they had just assured a sovereign state that the purpose of a visa was to meet with them.
Thirdly, some hosts are subject to the rules of jurisdictions which prevent them from even replying to individuals from certain countries, and the language "all interested in-person participants" fails to recognize this reality. I have not drawn the diagram lately, but the chances are good that these restrictions would cover the majority of potential hosts if read strictly.
Lastly, as written, this has a curiously two-sided view of the entire matter. The IESG (rather than, say the LLC) is setting out the policy for a matter in terms which strongly assert it is the controller of the meeting and the conditions appropriate to it. It then goes on to disclaim one of the critical roles of a meeting convener, leaving it to a different party (should one exist). These are the IETF's meetings or they are not. The IETF does issue these for plenary meetings, so I believe that this is generally understood to be our job; the choice to avoid that duty here is not well motivated or explained.
I will also point out a serious risk in the case that the IESG choses to maintain this approach: meetings that deliberately avoid the "interim" label but bring together the working group participants for related discussions, which then return to the formal process with their thinking only at the end of the interaction. Informal design teams, plugfests, and external hackathons are not covered and likely cannot be, but they are far more likely to be exclusionary subsets than an interim working group meeting would be. Those would, obviously, be subject to normal working group processes once they have returned to the formal process, but only after they may have developed considerable inertia. That's a bad result, at least in my opinion.
I ask you to reconsider this choice.
best regards,
Ted Hardie
(As an individual)
